over by a man suffering himself apparently from some species of eczema;
it is not pleasant to be ordered about peremptorily by uniformed men,
who, three months before, would have touched their hats to you, and to
have to do things instantly and promptly for the single reason that one
is told to do them.

Secondly, there was the abrupt change of life--of diet, air and
exercise....

Thirdly, there was the consideration, the more terrible because the more
completely unverifiable, as to what difference all this would make, not
only to the regard of his friends for him, but to his own regard for
himself. Innocence of a fault does not entirely do away with the
distress and stigma of its punishment. He imagined himself telling
Jenny; he tried to see her laughing, and somehow he could not. It was
wholly uncharacteristic of all that he knew of her, and yet somehow,
night after night, as the hours dragged by, he seemed to see her looking
at him a little contemptuously.

"At any rate," he almost heard her say, "if you didn't do it, you made a
friend of a man who did. And you were in prison."

Oh! there are countless excellent explanations of his really terrible
depression; and yet somehow it does not seem to me at all in line with
what I know of Frank, to think that they explain it in the least. I
prefer to believe, with a certain priest who will appear by and by, that
the thing was just one stage of a process that had to be accomplished,
and that if it had not come about in this way, it must have come about
in another. As for his religion, all emotional grasp of that fled, it
seemed finally, at the touch of real ignominy. He retained the
intellectual reasons for which he had become a Catholic, but the thing
seemed as apart from him as his knowledge of law--such as it
was--acquired at Cambridge, or his proficiency in lawn-tennis. Certainly
it was no kind of consolation to him to reflect on the sufferings of
Christian martyrs!

It was a Friday evening when he came out and went quickly round the
corner of the jail, in order to get away from any possibility of being
identified with it.

He had had a short interview with the Governor--a very conscientious and
religious man, who made a point of delivering what he called "a few
earnest words" to every prisoner before his release. But, naturally
enough, they were extraordinarily off the point. It was not helpful to
Frank to have it urged upon him to set about an honest livelihood-