ext year."

"But," said she, "you wouldn't want to publish a book about him and have
him live it down?"

"Why shouldn't I?" asked Jeffrey, turning on her. "He's willing."

"He can't be willing," Lydia broke in. "It's frightful."

"Well, he is," said Jeffrey. "There's nothing you could do to him he'd
mind, if it gave him good advertising."

"What does he want to do," asked the colonel, "when he comes out?"

"Get into the game again. Make big money. And if it's necessary, steal
it. Not that he wants to bunco. He's had his dose. He's learned it isn't
safe. But he'd make some dashing _coup_; he couldn't help it. Maybe he'd
get nabbed."

"What a horrid person!" said Lydia. "How can you have anything to do
with him?"

"Why, he's interesting," said Jeffrey, in a way she found brutal. "He's
a criminal. He's got outside."

"Outside what?" she persisted.

"Law. And he wouldn't particularly want to get back, except that it
pays. But I'm not concerned with what he does when he gets back. I want
to show how it seemed to him outside and how he got there. He's more
picturesque than I am, or I'd take myself."

Blessed Anne, who had no grasp, she thought, of abstract values, but
knew how to make a man able for his work, met the situation quietly.

"You could have the blue chamber, couldn't he, Farvie? and do your
writing there."

Lydia flashed her a reproachful glance. She would have scattered his
papers and spilled the ink, rather than have him do a deed like that. If
he did it, it was not with her good-will. Jeff had drawn his frown the
tighter.

"I don't know whether I can do it," he said. "A man has got to know how
to write."

"You wrote some remarkable things for the _Nestor_," said the colonel,
now hesitating. It had been one of the rules he and the girls had
concocted for the treatment of a returning prisoner, never to refer to
stone walls and iron bars. But surely, he felt, Jeff needed
encouragement.

Jeff was ruthless.

"That was all rot," he said.

"What was?" Lydia darted at him. "Didn't you mean what you said?"

"It was idiotic for the papers to take it up," said Jeff. "They got it
all wrong. 'There's a man,' they said, 'in the Federal Prison, Jeffrey
Blake, the defaulter. Very talented. Has revolutionised the _Nestor_,
the prison organ. Let him out, pardon him, simply because he can
write.'"

"As I understand," said his father, "you did get the name of the paper
changed."

"Well, now," said Jef