ckade in huts which they built for themselves. Ten
hours a day they wrought at the mines, the rest of the day and night
was under their own control; and in return for their labor they were
supplied with rations from the settlement.

Now Red Jason, as a docile prisoner, was almost the first to get
promotion to the Free Command. He did not ask for it, he did not
wish for it, and when it came he looked askance at it.

"Send somebody else," he said to his warders, but they laughed and
turned him adrift.

He began to build his house of the lava stones on the mountain side,
not far from the hospital, and near to a house being built by an
elderly man much disfigured about the cheeks, who had been a priest,
imprisoned long ago by Jorgen Jorgensen out of spite and yet baser
motives. And as he worked at raising the walls of his hut, he
remembered with a pang the mill he built in Port-y-Vullin, and what a
whirlwind of outraged passion brought every stone of it to the ground
again. With this occupation, and occasional gossip with his neighbor,
he passed the evenings of his Free Command. And looking towards the
hospital as often as he saw the little groups of men go up to it that
told of another prisoner injured in the perilous labor of the sulphur
mines, he sometimes saw a woman come out at the door to receive them.

"Who is she?" he asked of the priest.

"The foreign nurse," said the priest. "And a right good woman, too,
as I have reason to say, for she nursed me back to life after that
spurt of hot water had scalded these holes into my face."

That made Jason think of other scenes, and of tender passages in his
broken life that were gone from him forever. He had no wish to recall
them; their pleasure was too painful, their sweets too bitter; they
were lost, and God grant that they could be forgotten. Yet every
night as he worked at his walls he looked longingly across the
shoulder of the hill in the direction of the hospital, half fancying
he knew the sweet grace of the figure he sometimes saw there, and
pretending with himself that he remembered the light rhythm of its
movement. After a while he missed what he looked for, and then he
asked his neighbor if the nurse were ill that he had not seen her
lately.

"Ill? Well, yes," said the old priest. "She has been turned away from
the hospital."

"What!" cried Jason; "you thought her a good nurse."

"She was too good, my lad," said the priest, "and a blackguard warder
who