car drove away westward. At two in the morning
Eleanor was waked by a telephone from Mrs. O'Bannon. Dan had not come
home. She was afraid something had happened to him. A man in his
position had many enemies. Did Eleanor think that some friend or lover
of that Thorne girl----

Oh, no, Eleanor was sure not!

The next morning--for a small town holds few secrets--she knew that
O'Bannon had returned at six o'clock, drunk.

"Oh, dear heaven," thought Eleanor, "must he re-travel that road?"

CHAPTER XIII

Lydia and her guard arrived at the prison early in the evening. She had
been travelling all through the hot, bright September day. For the first
hour she had been only aware of the proximity of the guard, of the
crowded car, the mingled smell of oranges and coal smoke, the newspaper
on the floor, trodden by every foot, containing probably an account of
her departure for her long imprisonment. Then, her eyes wandering to the
river, she suddenly remembered that it would be years before she saw
mountains and flowing water again. Perhaps she would never see them
again.

During the previous winter she had gone with Benny and Mrs. Galton to
visit a prison in a neighboring state--a man's prison. It was considered
an unfortunate example. Scenes from that visit came back to her in a
series of pictures. A giant negro highwayman weaving at an immense loom
with a heavy, hopeless regularity. Black, airless punishment
cells--"never used nowadays," the warden had said lightly, and had been
corrected by a low murmur from the keeper; two of them were in use at
the moment. The tiers of ordinary cells, not so very much better, with
their barred loopholes. And the smells--the terrible prison smells. At
their best, disinfectant and stale soap; at worst--Lydia never knew that
it was possible to remember a smell as she now remembered that one. But
most of all she remembered the chalky pallor of some of the prisoners,
some obviously tubercular, others twitching with nervous affections. She
doubted coolly if many people were strong enough to go through years of
that sort of thing.

So she would look at the river as if she might never see it again.

They were already in the Highlands, and the hills on the eastern
side--her side of the river--were throwing a morning shadow on the
water, while across the way the white marble buildings at West Point
shone in the sunlight. Storm King with its abrupt bulk interposed itself
between the tw