long after he passed by. He knew well that in the gaze was nothing of
the interest which a woman feels in a man; it was the look of one chained
to a rock, who sees a Samaritan in the cheerless distance.

In the daily round of her life she was always busy; not restlessly, but
constantly, and always silently, busy. She was even more silent than her
laconic half-breed hired woman, Rada. There was no talk with her
gloating husband which was not monosyllabic. Her canary sang, but no
music ever broke from her own lips. She murmured over her lovely yellow
companion; she kissed it, pleaded with it for more song, but the only
music at her own lips was the occasional music of her voice; and it had a
colourless quality which, though gentle, had none of the eloquence and
warmth of youth.

In form and feature she was one made for emotion and demonstration, and
the passionate play of the innocent enterprises of wild youth; but there
was nothing of that in her. Gray age had drunk her life and had given
her nothing in return--neither companionship nor sympathy nor
understanding; only the hunger of a coarse manhood. Her obedience to
the supreme will of her jealous jailer gave no ground for scolding or
reproach, and that saved her much. She was even quietly cheerful, but
it was only the pale reflection of a lost youth which would have been
buoyant and gallant, gay and glad, had it been given the natural thing
in the natural world.

There came a day, however, when the long, unchanging routine, gray with
prison grayness, was broken; when the round of household duties and the
prison discipline were interrupted. It was as sudden as a storm in the
tropics, as final and as fateful as birth or death. That day she was
taken suddenly and acutely ill. It was only a temporary malady, an