o sections of new road--the road which Lydia had so much
desired to see finished. She and Bobby had had a plan to motor along it
to the Emmonses some day--Newburgh. There was a hotel there where she
had stopped once for luncheon on her way to Tuxedo from somewhere or
other. Then presently the bridge at Poughkeepsie, and then the station
at which she had got out when she had spent Sunday with the Emmonses,
the day Evans had been arrested and had confessed to that man----There
was the very pillar she had waited beside while the chauffeur looked up
her bags. Now the river began to narrow, there were marshy islands in
it, and huge shaky ice houses along the brink. It all unrolled before
her like a picture that she was never going to see again. Then Albany,
set on its hills, and the train, turning sharply, rumbled over the
bridge into the blackened station. Almost everybody in the car got out
here, for the train stopped some time; but she and her guard remained
sitting silently side by side. Then presently they were going on again,
through the beautiful wide fertile valley of the Mohawk----They were
getting near, very near. She felt not frightened but physically sick.
She wondered if her hair would be cut short. Of course it would. It
seemed to her like an indignity committed by O'Bannon's own hand.

It was dark when they reached the station, so dark that she could not
get a definite idea of anything but the great wall of the prison, and
the clang of the unbarring of the great gate. Later she came to know the
doorway with its incongruous beauty--the white door with its fanlight
and side windows, and two low stairways curving up to it, and, above,
the ironwork porch, supported on square ironwork columns of a leaf
pattern, suggestive somehow of an old wistaria vine. But now she knew
nothing between the gate and the opening of the front door.

She entered what might have been the wide hall of an old-fashioned and
extraordinarily bare country house. A wide stairway rose straight before
her, and wide, old-fashioned doors opened formally to left and right.

She was taken into the room at the right--the matron's room. While her
name and age and crime were being registered she stood staring straight
before her where bookshelves ran to the ceiling. She could recognise
familiar bindings--the works of Marion Crawford and Mrs. Humphry Ward.

Calm brown-eyed women seemed to surround her, but she would not even
look at them. Their imper