in if I saw it. There was a window opening into
a little paved courtyard with a fountain in it, and doves drinking. But
I shall never see it again. And the drug became alive like a fiend, and
pushed me lower and lower, down, always down, until I did something
dreadful, I don't know now exactly what it was, though the prison
chaplain explained it to me. But it was about a cheque, and I was
convicted and sent to prison."

"Then you have been in prison _twice_?" I said, anxious to make it easy
for her to be entirely truthful, for I could not doubt the truth of much
of this earlier history.

She did not seem to hear me.

"There is no crime," she went on, "however black, that I did not expiate
then. If suffering can wash out sins, I washed out mine. I, who thought
I had so many enemies, have no enemy. No one has ever injured me. But if
I had the cruellest in the world, I would not condemn him, if he were a
morphia maniac, to sudden enforced abstinence and prison life. And I
could not die. I am very strong by nature. I could neither die nor live.
It was months before I saw light, months of hell, consumed in the flame
of hell which is thirst. And slowly the power to live came back to me. I
was saved in spite of myself. And slowly the power of thought returned
to me. I had time to think. My mind drifted and drifted, but I got
control of it now and again, and then for longer intervals, as my poor
body reasserted itself from the slavery of the drug. And I thought--I
thought--I thought. And at last I made up my mind, my fierce, embittered
mind. And when I came out of prison, I took to the road. Even then there
were those who would have helped me, but I steeled my heart against
them. There was a strange woman with a sweet face waiting at the prison
door, who spoke kindly to me. But I distrusted her. I distrusted every
one. And I did not mean to be helped any more. I had been helped time
and time again. To be helped was to be put where I could get morphia,
where I had something, if it was only my clothes, which I could sell to
get it, where I could _steal_ things to sell to get it. If I had any
possessions, I knew that some day--not for a time perhaps, but some
day--I should sell it and get morphia somehow. They say you can't buy
it, but you can. I always could in the past, and I knew I always should
in the future. But on the road, in rags, a tramp, down in the dust, in
the safe refuge of the dust--there it was not possible. There