treets, soul-stunning uniformity, and
living death.

"'Morning, Malet-Marsac," said Major Ranald of the Indian Medical
Service, Superintendent of the jail. "You look a bit blue about the
gills, what?"

"'Morning, Ranald," replied Malet-Marsac, "I _am_ a little cold."

Was he really speaking? Was that voice his? He supposed so.

Could he pretend to gaze round with an air of intelligent interest? He
would try.

A line of convicts, clad in a kind of striped sacking, stood with their
backs to a wall while a native warder strode up and down in front of
them, watching another convict placing brushes and implements before
them. Suddenly the warder spoke to the end man, an elderly stalwart
fellow, obviously from the North. The reply was evidently
unsatisfactory, perhaps insolent, for the warder suddenly seized the
grey beard of the convict, tugged his head violently from side to side,
shook him, and then smote him hard on either cheek. The elderly convict
gave no sign of having felt either the pain or the indignity, but gazed
straight over the warder's head. Of what was he thinking? Of what might
be the fate of that warder were he suddenly transported to the wilds of
Kathiawar, to lie at the mercy of his late victim and the famous band of
outlaws whom he had once led to fame--a fame as wide as Ind?

There was something fine about the old villain, once a real Robin Hood,
something mean about the little tyrant.

Had Ranald seen the incident? No, he stood with his back to a buttress
looking in the opposite direction. Did he always stand with a wall
behind him in this terrible place? How could he live in it? A minute of
it made one sick if one were cursed with imagination. Oh, the horror of
the prison system--especially for brave men, men with a code of honour
of their own--possibly sometimes a higher code than that of the average
British politician, not to mention the be-knighted cosmopolitan
financier, friend of princes and honoured of kings.

Could not men be segregated in a place of peace and beauty and improved,
instead of being segregated in a dull hell and crushed? What a home of
soulless, hopeless horror!... And his friend was here.... Could he
contain himself?... He must say something.

"Do you always keep your back to a wall when standing still, in here?"
he asked of Major Ranald.

"I do," was the reply, "and I walk with a trustworthy man close behind
me." "Would you like to go round, sometime?" he added.

"