ach day brought her nearer to
release. She began to dream that she was already free, and to wake
dissatisfied, with a trace of the same restless irritation of her first
weeks. Could it be, she thought, that she had learned nothing after all?
Could even the idea of returning to the old life change her back into
the old detestable thing?

Prison authorities have learned that the last night in prison is more
trying to a prisoner's morale than any other, except perhaps the first.
Lydia found it so when her last night there came. She knew that she was
to be set free early in the morning. Miss Bennett would be there, and
they would take an early train to New York together. It was a certainty,
she kept telling herself, a certainty on which she could rely, and yet
she spent the entire night in an agony of fear and impatience. She would
have been calmer if she had been waiting the hour of a prearranged
escape. The darkness of night continued so long that it seemed as if
some unheralded eclipse had done away with sunrise, and when at last the
dawn began to color the window the hour between it and her release was
nothing but a fevered anxiety.

She was hardly aware of Miss Bennett waiting for her in the matron's
room--hardly aware of the matron herself, imperturbable as ever, bidding
her good-by. Only the clang of the gate behind her quieted her. Only
from outside the bars did she want to pause and look back at the prison
as at an old friend.

It was a bright autumn morning. The wind was chasing immense white
clouds across the sky and scattering the leaves of the endless row of
trees that stood like sentinels along the high wall.

Miss Bennett wanted to hurry across the street at once to the railroad
station, although their train would not start for some time; she wanted
to get away from the menace of that dark wall--a very perfect piece of
masonry. But Lydia had seen it too long from the inside not to be eager
to savor a view of it from without. She stared slowly about her like a
tourist before some spectacle of awesome beauty. She looked down the
alley between the trees and the wall to where on her left was the sharp
clean corner of the stonework. She looked to her right, where as the
wall rose higher she could see the little watchtower of the prison
guard. Then she turned completely round and looked back through the bars
at the prison itself.

"Don't you think it's a pretty old doorway?" she said.

Miss Bennett acknowled