“Some have been dismissed; the others are working again all right.”

“All right!”

She looked up then so pitifully that he did not ask her anything more.  But the news put him back a week.  And she was in despair.  The day he got up again he began afresh: 

“When are the assizes?”

“The 7th of August.”

“Has anybody been to see Bob Tryst?”

“Yes; Aunt Kirsteen has been twice.”

Having been thus answered, he was quiet for a long time.  She had slipped again out of her chair to kneel beside him; it seemed the only place from which she could find courage for her answers.  He put his hand, that had lost its brown, on her hair.  At that she plucked up spirit to ask: 

“Would you like me to go and see him?”

He nodded.

“Then, I will—­to-morrow.”

“Don’t ever tell me what isn’t true, Nedda!  People do; that’s why I didn’t ask before.”

She answered fervently: 

“I won’t!  Oh, I won’t!”

She dreaded this visit to the prison.  Even to think of those places gave her nightmare.  Sheila’s description of her night in a cell had made her shiver with horror.  But there was a spirit in Nedda that went through with things; and she started early the next day, refusing Kirsteen’s proffered company.

The look of that battlemented building, whose walls were pierced with emblems of the Christian faith, turned her heartsick, and she stood for several minutes outside the dark-green door before she could summon courage to ring the bell.

A stout man in blue, with a fringe of gray hair under his peaked cap, and some keys dangling from a belt, opened, and said: 

“Yes, miss?”

Being called ‘miss’ gave her a little spirit, and she produced the card she had been warming in her hand.

“I have come to see a man called Robert Tryst, waiting for trial at the assizes.”

The stout man looked at the card back and front, as is the way of those in doubt, closed the door behind her, and said: 

“Just a minute, miss.”

The shutting of the door behind her sent a little shiver down Nedda’s spine; but the temperature of her soul was rising, and she looked round.  Beyond the heavy arch, beneath which she stood, was a courtyard where she could see two men, also in blue, with peaked caps.  Then, to her left, she became conscious of a shaven-headed noiseless being in drab-gray clothes, on hands and knees, scrubbing the end of a corridor.  Her tremor at the stealthy ugliness of this crouching figure yielded at once to a spasm of pity.  The man gave her a look, furtive, yet so charged with intense penetrating curiosity that it seemed to let her suddenly into innumerable secrets.  She felt as if the whole life of people shut away in silence and solitude were disclosed to her in the swift, unutterably alive look of this noiseless kneeling creature, riving out of her something to feed his