my own obstinacy
and a sort of dogged feeling that made me feel I couldn't give in. I
believe it done me good, though. I do really think I should have gone
mad else, thinking of the dreadful long months and years that lay before
me without a chance of getting out.

Sometimes I'd take a low fit and refuse my food, and very near give up
living altogether. The least bit more, and I'd have died outright. One
day there was a party of ladies and gentlemen came to be shown over the
gaol. There was a lot of us passing into the exercise yard. I happened
to look up for a minute, and saw one of the ladies looking steadily at
us, and oh! what a pitying look there was in her face. In a moment I saw
it was Miss Falkland, and, by the change that came into her face, that
she knew me again, altered as I was. I wondered how she could have known
me. I was a different-looking chap from when she had seen me last. With
a beastly yellow-gray suit of prison clothes, his face scraped smooth
every day, like a fresh-killed pig, and the look of a free man gone out
of his face for ever--how any woman, gentle or simple, ever can know a
man in gaol beats me. Whether or no, she knew me. I suppose she saw the
likeness to Jim, and she told him, true enough, she'd never forget him
nor what he'd done for her.

I just looked at her, and turned my head away. I felt as if I'd make a
fool of myself if I didn't. All the depth down that I'd fallen since I
was shearing there at Boree rushed into my mind at once. I nearly fell
down, I know. I was pretty weak and low then; I'd only just come out of
the doctor's hands.

I was passing along with the rest of the mob. I heard her voice quite
clear and firm, but soft and sweet, too. How sweet it sounded to me
then!

'I wish to speak a few words to the third prisoner in the line--the tall
one. Can I do so, Captain Wharton?'

'Oh! certainly, Miss Falkland,' said the old gentleman, who had brought
them all in to look at the wonderful neat garden, and the baths, and the
hospital, and the unnatural washed-up, swept-up barracks that make the
cleanest gaol feel worse than the roughest hut. He was the visiting
magistrate, and took a deal of interest in the place, and believed he
knew all the prisoners like a book. 'Oh! certainly, my dear young lady.
Is Richard Marston an acquaintance of yours?'

'He and his brother worked for my father at Boree,' she said, quite
stately. 'His brother saved my life.'

I was called bac