er 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 soul and body on. That look
seemed to lick its lips. It made her angry, made her miserable, with
a feeling of pity she could hardly bear. Tears, too startled to flow,
darkened her eyes. Poor man! How he must hate her, who was free, and all
fresh from the open world and the sun, and people to love and talk to!
The 'poor man' scrubbed on steadily, his ears standing out from his
shaven head; then, dragging his knee-mat skew-ways, he took the chance
to look at her again. Perhaps because his dress and cap and stubble of
hair and even the color of his face were so drab-gray, those little dark
eyes seemed to her the most terribly living things she had ever seen.
She felt that they had taken her in from top to toe, clothed and
unclothed, taken in the resentment she had felt and the pity she was
feeling; they seemed at once to appeal, to attack, and to possess her
ravenously, as though all the starved instincts in a whole prisoned
world had rushed up and for a second stood outs