ould not help to feed her
and her child; she would certainly lose her place, while he--what was to
happen to him God only knew.

Half the night he paced the floor, wrestling with this nightmare; and
when he was exhausted he lay down, trying to sleep, but finding instead,
for the first time in his life, that his brain was too much for him. In
the cell next to him was a drunken wife-beater and in the one beyond
a yelling maniac. At midnight they opened the station house to the
homeless wanderers who were crowded about the door, shivering in the
winter blast, and they thronged into the corridor outside of the cells.
Some of them stretched themselves out on the bare stone floor and fell
to snoring, others sat up, laughing and talking, cursing and quarreling.
The air was fetid with their breath, yet in spite of this some of them
smelled Jurgis and called down the torments of hell upon him, while he
lay in a far corner of his cell, counting the throbbings of the blood in
his forehead.

They had brought him his supper, which was "duffers and dope"--being
hunks of dry bread on a tin plate, and coffee, called "dope" because it
was drugged to keep the prisoners quiet. Jurgis had not known this, or
he would have swallowed the stuff in desperation; as it was, every nerve
of him was a-quiver with shame and rage. Toward morning the place fell
silent, and he got up and began to pace his cell; and then within the
soul of him there rose up a fiend, red-eyed and cruel, and tore out the
strings of his heart.

It was not for himself that he suffered--what did a man who worked in
Durham's fertilizer mill care about anything that the world might do
to him! What was any tyranny of prison compared with the tyranny of the
past, of the thing that had happened and could not be recalled, of the
memory that could never be effaced! The horror of it drove him mad;
he stretched out his arms to heaven, crying out for deliverance from
it--and there was no deliverance, there was no power even in heaven that
could undo the past. It was a ghost that would not drown; it followed
him, it seized upon him and beat him to the ground. Ah, if only he could
have foreseen it--but then, he would have foreseen it, if he had not
been a fool! He smote his hands upon his forehead, cursing himself
because he had ever allowed Ona to work where she had, because he had
not stood between her and a fate which every one knew to be so common.
He should have taken her away, e