go on with, but of course she did go on.
"I see her every week. She's like an animal in a trap. Perhaps you never
saw one--in a trap, I mean. Lydia had a gray wolfhound once, and in the
woods it strayed away and got caught in a mink trap. It was almost dead
when we found it, but so patient and hopeless. She's getting to be like
that--each week a little more patient than the week before--she who was
never patient. Oh, Mr. O'Bannon, I feel sometimes as if I couldn't bear
it--the way they've ground it out of her in a few months! She seems like
an old woman in a lovely young woman's body. They haven't spoiled
that--at least they haven't yet."

She wiped her eyes with a filmy handkerchief, and her step became
brisker. She felt better. For a moment she had got rid of the pathos of
the situation. O'Bannon, she saw, had taken up her burden. He walked
along beside her silent for a few steps, and then suddenly took off his
hat, murmured something about being late for an engagement and left her,
disappearing down the steep slope of the reservoir.

He wandered restlessly up and down like a man in physical pain. No
reality, he finally decided, could be as terrible as the visions which,
with the help of Miss Bennett, his imagination kept calling before him.
That night he took the train, and in the middle of the next morning
arrived at the prison gates.

There was no difficulty about his seeing the prisoner. His explanation
that he was passing by on his way to see the warden about one of the men
prisoners was not required. The matron agreed readily to send for Lydia.
It seemed to him a long time before she came. He stood staring out of
the window, stray sentences leaping up in his mind--"not less than three
nor more than seven years"--"an animal in a trap"--"an old woman in a
lovely young woman's body." He heard steps approaching and his pulses
began to beat thickly and heavily. He turned round, and as he did so she
fell at his feet.

The matron came in, running at the sound of her fall. O'Bannon picked
her up limp as a rag doll in his arms and carried her back to her cell.
Under most circumstances he would have noticed that the cell was bright
and large, but now he only compared it, with a pang at his heart, to
that large, luxurious, deserted bedroom of Lydia's in which he had once
interviewed Evans.

The matron drove him away before Lydia recovered consciousness. He
waited in the outer room, heard that she was perfectly well,