His letters to me were few as he wrote regularly to his daughter; but after he had been in prison eighteen years he wrote me the joyful news that he would be released in a few weeks, for his lawyer had proven a faithful friend. The letter was a very happy one written in December, and the warden had allowed Bowers to tinker up some little gifts to be sent to the wife and daughter. "They stand in a row before me as I am writing, _and I think they are as beautiful as butterflies_," his letter said.
On his release Bowers, now a man past forty, had to begin life over again. He had lost his place in his community, he had no money, but he had hope and ambition, and as a good chance was offered him in the penitentiary city he decided to take it and go right to work. He wrote his daughter that he would arrange for her and her mother to come to him, and there they would start a new home together.
Little did he dream of the shock awaiting him when the answer to that letter came, telling him that for several years his wife had been married to the man who had given Carrie a home. Both the man and the woman had supposed that when Bowers was sent to prison for life the wife was divorced and free to marry. She was hopeless as to her husband's release, and tired and discouraged with her struggle with poverty. Her brief married life had come to seem only a memory of her youth, and she was glad of the chance to be taken care of like other women, but a feeling of tenderness and pity for the prisoner had caused her to protect him from the knowledge of her inconstancy.
The second husband felt that to Bowers must be left the decision as to the adjustment of the tangled relationships, and Bowers wrote me that he had decided that the second husband had the stronger claim, as he had married the woman in good faith and made her happy; one thing he insisted upon, however--that if the present arrangement were to continue, his former wife must take her divorce from him and be legally married to the other man. And this was done.
To find himself another Enoch Arden was a hard blow to Bowers, but the years of work and poverty must have wrought such changes in the girl wife of long ago that she was lost to him forever; while the man who came out of that prison after eighteen years of patient endurance and the spiritual development that long acquaintance with grief sometimes brings was a different being from the light-hearted young farmer's boy that the girl had married. They must inevitably have become as strangers to each other.