r name--"

"Decidedly."

"And do a little preliminary advertising. How prison life had undermined
your health and even touched your reason, so you weren't absolutely--you
understand? _Then_ we'd publish it as an eccentric book by an eccentric
fellow, a victim of prison regulations."

Jeff laid his papers down on the table beside him and set a glass on
them to keep them from blowing away.

"No," said he. "I never was saner in my life. I'm about the only sane
man in this town, because I've discovered we're all mad and the rest of
'em don't know it."

"That very remark!" said the young man, in unmixed approval. "Don't you
see what that would do in an ad? My dear chap, they all think the other
man's daffy."

Jeff carried the manuscript into the house, and asked the wise young
judge to come out and see his late corn, and offered him a platter of
it if he'd stay to supper. And he actually did, and proved to be a very
good fellow indeed, born in the country, and knowing all its ways, only
gifted with a diabolical talent for adapting himself to all sorts of
places and getting on. He was quite shy in the face of Anne and Lydia.
All his cockiness left him before their sober graces, and when Jeff took
him to the station he had lost, for the moment, his rapier-like action
of intellect for an almost maudlin gratitude over the family he had been
privileged to meet.

Anne and Lydia had paid him only an absent-minded courtesy. They were on
the point of giving an evening of folk-dancing, under Miss Amabel's
patronage, and young foreigners were dropping in all the time now to ask
questions and make plans. And whoever they were, these soft-eyed aliens,
they looked at Jeff with the look he knew. To them also he was The
Prisoner.

XXVII

With these folk dances began what has been known ever since as the
Dramatic Movement in Addington. On this first night the proudly
despairing ticket-seller began to repeat by seven o'clock: "Every seat
taken." Many stood and more were turned away. But the families of the
sons and daughters who were dancing were clever enough to come early,
and filled the body of the hall. Jeff was among them. He, too, had gone
early, with Anne and Lydia, to carry properties and help them with the
stage. And when he wasn't needed behind the scenes, he went out and sat
among the gay contingent from Mill End, magnificent creatures by
physical inheritance, the men still rough round the edges from the day's