did not meet during the day. They met in the hour after
tea, before the prisoners were locked in their cells for the night; an
hour when in the large hall they were allowed to read and talk and sew
and tat--tatting was very popular just then.

Lydia had sunk into a rocking-chair. She could not fix her mind on a
book, and she did not know how to sew or tat, and talk for talk's sake
had never been one of her amusements. She was thinking "One day has gone
by out of perhaps seven years. In seven years I shall be thirty-three,"
when she felt some one approaching her, and looking up she saw it was
Evans.

Evans, in a striped cotton, did not look so different from the lady's
maid of the old days, except, as Lydia noticed with vague surprise, she
had put on weight. She came with the hurried walk that made her skirts
flip out at her heels--the same walk with which she used to come when
she was late to dress Lydia for dinner. She almost expected to hear the
familiar, "What will you wear, miss?" A dozen memories flashed into her
mind--Evans polishing her jewels in the sunlight, Evans locked in the
disordered bedroom refusing her confidence to everyone, and then
collapsing and confessing to "that man."

She looked away from the approaching figure, hoping the girl would take
the hint; but no, Evans was drawing up a chair with something of the
manner of a hostess to a new arrival.

"Oh, Evans!" was Lydia's greeting, very much in her old manner.

"You'd better call me Louisa here--I mean, it's first names we use,"
said Evans.

The fact had already been called to her former employer's attention by
Muriel, who had done nothing but call her Lydia in a futile effort to be
friendly. She steeled herself to hear it from Evans, who, however,
managed to avoid it. She gossiped of the prison news, and tried to cheer
and help this newcomer with whatever wisdom she had acquired. Lydia
neither moved nor answered nor again looked up.

"As the matron says," Evans ran on, "the worst is over when you get
here. It's the trial and the sentence and the journey that's worst.
After a week or so you'll begin to get used to it."

Lydia's nostrils trembled.

"I shall never get used to it," she said. "I don't belong here. What I
did was no crime."

There was a short pause. Lydia waited for Evans' cordial agreement to
what seemed a self-evident assertion. None came. Instead she said
gently, as she might have explained to a child, "Oh, miss, they all