imply recognized him as a
useful person whom all her life she would go on using. This coming
interview must serve to attach him to her, so that if in the future she
needed a powerful politician to help her destroy O'Bannon she would have
one ready to her hand. She knew exactly and instinctively how to manage
Albee--not by being appealing and friendly. If she were nice to him he
would go away feeling that that chapter in his life was satisfactorily
closed. But if she were hostile, if she made him uncomfortable, he would
work to win back her friendship. Prisoner as she was, she would be his
master. She arranged herself, expression and spirit alike, to meet him
sternly.

She did not stop to consider the impression she might make on her
visitor--in her striped dress and her prison shoes. It was never Lydia's
habit to think first of the impression she was making.

She was brought to the matron's room, and then crossing the hall she
entered the bare reception room, with its chill, white mantelpiece, the
fireplace blocked by a sheet of metal, its empty center table and stiff
straight-backed chairs. She entered without any anticipation of what was
in store for her, and saw a tall figure just turning from the window. It
was O'Bannon. She had just a blurred vision of his gray eyes and the
hollows in his cheeks. Then her wrists and knees seemed to melt, her
heart turned over within her; everything grew yellow, green and black,
and she fainted--falling gently full length at the feet of the district
attorney.

When she came to she was in her own cell. She turned her head slowly to
right and left.

"Where is that man?" she said. She was told he had gone.

Of course he had gone--gone without waiting for her recovery, without
speaking to anyone else. There was the proof that he was vindictive;
that he had come to humiliate her, to feast his eyes on her distress. He
had hardly dared hope that she would faint at his feet. There was real
cruelty for you, she thought--to ruin a woman's life and then to come
and enjoy the spectacle. What a story for him to go home with, to
remember and smile over, to tell, perhaps, to his mother or Eleanor!

"The poor girl!" he might say with tones of false pity in his voice. "At
the mere sight of me she fainted dead away and lay at my feet in her
prison dress, her hands coarsened by hard work----"

This last proof of her utter defenselessness infuriated her. She was
justified in her revenge, whatev