after
the retreating figure. At another station a police inspector, dressed in
a little brief authority, caught sight of the blue cap and gray jacket,
and bustled up to examine the warder's papers. Then, with a lofty look,
he strode through the group of spectators whom his presence had
attracted.

Arrived at Waterloo, the warder hailed a cab, and they drove to Scotland
Yard to report themselves. There they supped on cocoa and brown bread,
with the addition of a rasher of bacon and a pipe for the warder. Thence
they were driven to Euston to catch the nine-o'clock train to Penrith.

The journey north was uneventful. At Rugby, Stafford, and elsewhere, the
train stopped, and little groups of people looked in at the convict, and
made apposite comments on his appearance, crime, and condition. Paul
Ritson often shut his eyes and said nothing. Sometimes a sneer curled
his lip, sometimes he burst into a bitter laugh. He was thinking that
this was a fitting close to the degradation of his prison life. If one
feeling of delicacy, one tender sentiment, one impulse of humanity
remained to him when the gates of Portland closed behind him; it only
required this cruel torture to crush it forever.

In spite of the risk of dismissal and the more immediate danger at the
hands of Paul Ritson, the warder coiled himself up and fell asleep. It
was after midnight when they reached Crewe, and from that point of the
journey the worst of the torment ceased. Their merciful fellow-men were
mostly in bed, dreaming of heroic deeds that they were doing. But the
silence of night had its own torture. As the train rumbled on through
the darkness, now rattling in a long tunnel, now sliding into open air
like a boat into still water, Paul Ritson's mind went back to the day
which seemed now to be so far away that it might have belonged to
another existence, when he traveled this road with the dear soul who had
trusted her young and cloudless life to his keeping. Where was she now?
Peace be with her, wheresoever she was! He recalled her tenderest
glance, he seemed to hear her softest tone; the light pressure of her
delicate fingers was now on his hands--the hard hands that wore the
irons. And even at that moment, when all his soul went out to the pure
young wife who had shared his sufferings, and he felt as if time and
space were nothing, as if he had drawn her to him by the power of his
yearning love, it seemed to him that all at once there rang in his ea