they wouldn't let
me. But I got word about him. He's been fearful sick just lately. He
caught a cold walking in the yard, and it got down to his lungs.
That's why they are letting him out. They say he's changed so. I
wonder if I'm changed much?" she said. "I've fallen off since I was
ill." She passed her hands slowly over her face, with a touch of
vanity that hurt Bronson somehow, and he wished he might tell her how
pretty she still was. "Do you think he'll know me?" she asked. "Do you
think she'll let me speak to him?"

"I don't know. How can I tell?" said the reporter, sharply. He was
strangely nervous and upset. He could see no way out of it. The girl
seemed to be telling the truth, and yet the man's wife was with him
and by his side, as she should be, and this woman had no place on the
scene, and could mean nothing but trouble to herself and to every one
else. "Come," he said, abruptly, "we had better be getting up there.
It's only five minutes of twelve."

The girl turned with a quick start, and walked on ahead of them up the
drive leading between the snow-covered grass-plots that stretched from
the pavement to the wall of the prison. She moved unsteadily and
slowly, and Bronson saw that she was shivering, either from excitement
or the cold.

"I guess," said Gallegher, in an awed whisper, "that there's going to
be a scrap."

"Shut up," said Bronson.

They stopped a few yards before the great green double gate, with a
smaller door cut in one of its halves, and with the light from a big
lantern shining down on them. They could not see the clock-face from
where they stood, and when Bronson took out his watch and looked at
it, the girl turned her face to his appealingly, but did not speak.

"It will be only a little while now," he said, gently. He thought he
had never seen so much trouble and fear and anxiety in so young a
face, and he moved towards her and said, in a whisper, as though those
inside could hear him, "Control yourself if you can," and then added,
doubtfully, and still in a whisper, "You can take my arm if you need
it." The girl shook her head dumbly, but took a step nearer him, as if
for protection, and turned her eyes fearfully towards the gate. The
minutes passed on slowly but with intense significance, and they stood
so still that they could hear the wind playing through the wires of
the electric light back of them, and the clicking of the icicles as
they dropped from the edge of the prison w