ee you. Do you want to let her come
inside?"

"Thank you, yes," replied Cowperwood; and Bonhag hurried away,
unintentionally forgetting, in his boorish incivility, to unlock the
cell door, so that he had to open it in Aileen's presence. The long
corridor, with its thick doors, mathematically spaced gratings and
gray-stone pavement, caused Aileen to feel faint at heart. A prison,
iron cells! And he was in one of them. It chilled her usually courageous
spirit. What a terrible place for her Frank to be! What a horrible thing
to have put him here! Judges, juries, courts, laws, jails seemed like so
many foaming ogres ranged about the world, glaring down upon her and
her love-affair. The clank of the key in the lock, and the heavy outward
swinging of the door, completed her sense of the untoward. And then she
saw Cowperwood.

Because of the price he was to receive, Bonhag, after admitting her,
strolled discreetly away. Aileen looked at Cowperwood from behind
her veil, afraid to speak until she was sure Bonhag had gone. And
Cowperwood, who was retaining his self-possession by an effort, signaled
her but with difficulty after a moment or two. "It's all right," he
said. "He's gone away." She lifted her veil, removed her cloak, and took
in, without seeming to, the stuffy, narrow thickness of the room, his
wretched shoes, the cheap, misshapen suit, the iron door behind him
leading out into the little yard attached to his cell. Against such a
background, with his partially caned chairs visible at the end of the
bed, he seemed unnatural, weird even. Her Frank! And in this condition.
She trembled and it was useless for her to try to speak. She could only
put her arms around him and stroke his head, murmuring: "My poor boy--my
darling. Is this what they have done to you? Oh, my poor darling." She
held his head while Cowperwood, anxious to retain his composure, winced
and trembled, too. Her love was so full--so genuine. It was so soothing
at the same time that it was unmanning, as now he could see, making of
him a child again. And for the first time in his life, some inexplicable
trick of chemistry--that chemistry of the body, of blind forces which so
readily supersedes reason at times--he lost his self-control. The
depth of Aileen's feelings, the cooing sound of her voice, the velvety
tenderness of her hands, that beauty that had drawn him all the
time--more radiant here perhaps within these hard walls, and in the
face of his physic