IV

For a moment Jean crouched listening where she fell. No sound issuing

from within, she caught up her shawl and stole quickly toward the point

where she planned to scale the high fence which still shut her from

freedom. There was no moon, but the night was luminous with starshine,

and she hugged the shadows of the cottages. These buildings shouldered

one another closely in most part, but she came presently to a gap in

the friendly obscurity where a site awaited a structure for which

the state had vouchsafed no funds. It was bare of any sort of screen

whatever, and lay in full range not only of the quadrangle, which it

broke, but of the gatehouse beyond.

Nor was this all. Drifting round the last sheltering corner came

the reek of a pipe. Jean's heart sank. After all, the trap! Then

second thought told her that a foe in ambush would not smoke, and she

gathered courage to reconnoiter. Across the quadrangle she made out the

motionless figure of the watch. He was plainly without suspicion. He

had completed his circuit and was lounging against a hydrant, his idle

gaze upon the stars.

So for cycling ages he sat. Yet but a quarter of an hour had lapsed

when the man knocked the ashes from his pipe, yawned audibly, and

turned upon his heel. The instant the door of the gatehouse swallowed

him, Jean sped like a phantom across the open ground, skirted the

hospital, the tool-sheds, and the hotbeds, and plunged into the

recesses of the garden. All else was simple. The high fence had no

terrors; her scaling-ladder was a piece of board. The asperities of the

barbed wire she softened with her shawl. When the town clock brought

forth its next languid announcement she heard it without a tremor. She

was resting on a mossy slope a mile or more away.

She made but a brief halt, for the East, toward which she set her

face, was already paling. It was no blind flight. She struck for

the hills deliberately, since behind the hills ran the boundary of

another commonwealth. All fellow-runaways, whose stories she knew,

had foolishly held to the railroad or other main-traveled ways, and,

barring the brilliant Sophie, had for that very reason come early to

disaster. Jean reasoned that they were in all likelihood city girls

whom the woods terrified. Their stupidity was incredible. To fear what

they should love! She took great breaths of the cool fragrance. She

could not get her fill of it.

Nevertheless, it was not yet her purpose to quit the tilled countryside

utterly. She hoped first to compel clothing from it somehow--clothing,

and then food, of which she began to feel the need. The fact that

she must probably come unlawfully by these necessaries gave her

slight compunction. In some rose-colored, prosperous future she could

make anonymous amends. She haunted the outskirts of three several

farmhouses, but without success. At none of them had garments of any

kind been left outdoors over night. Some impossible rags fluttered from

a scarecrow in a field of young corn; that was all. Things edible, too,

were as carefully housed. Near the last place she found a spring with a

tin cup beside it. She drank long, and took the cup away with her.

It was too light now for foraging, and Jean took up her eastward march,

avoiding the highways and resorting to hedgerows, stone walls, or

briers where the woods failed. As the day grew she saw farmhands pass

to their work, and once, in the far distance, she caught the seductive

glitter of a dinner pail. She was ravenous from her long fast, and

nibbled at one or two palatable wild roots which she knew of old. They

seemed savorless to-day, almost sickening in fact; and her fancy dwelt

covetously upon the resources of orchard, garden, and field, that the

next month but one would lavish. Nevertheless, she harbored no regret

that she had taken time somewhat too eagerly by the forelock.

Noon found her beside a lake well up among the hills. She knew the

region by hearsay. People came here in hot weather, she remembered.

Somewhere alongshore should stand log-camps of a species which urban

souls fondly thought pioneer, but which snugly neighbored a summer

hotel where ice, newspapers, scandal, and like benefits of civilization

could be had. These play houses were as yet tenantless, of course--and

foodless; but the chance of finding some cast-off garment, possibly

too antiquated for a departing summer girl, but precious beyond cloth

of gold to a fugitive in blue-and-white check, buoyed Jean's spirits

and lent fresh energy to her muscles. Equipped with another dress,

be its style and color what they might, she felt that she could cope

fearlessly with fate.

She had followed the vagrant shore-line for perhaps a mile when two

things, assailing her senses simultaneously, brought her to an abrupt

halt. One was the smell of frying bacon; the other was a baritone voice

which broke suddenly into the chorus of a rollicking popular air. Jean

wheeled for flight, but, beguiled by the bacon which just then wafted a

fresh appeal, she turned, cautiously parted the undergrowth, and beheld

a young man swaying in a hammock slung between two birch trees. He held

in his lap a book into which he dipped infrequently, singing meanwhile;

and his attention was further divided between the crackling spider

and a fishing-rod propped in a forked stick at the water's edge. Jean

viewed his methods with disapproval. It was neither the way to read,

sing, fry bacon, nor yet fish.

Possibly some such idea suggested itself to this over versatile person,

for he presently rolled out of the hammock and centered his talents

upon the line, which he began to reel in as if the mechanism were an

amusing novelty. The stern critic in the background perceived the hand

of an amateur in the rebaiting, and predicted sorrier bungling still

when he should essay the cast. Her gloomiest forebodings, however, fell

far short of the amazing event. She expected the recklessly whirling

lead to shoot somewhere into the foliage, but nothing prepared her

for its sure descent upon herself. There was no disentangling that

outlandish collection of hooks at short notice, and she did not try.

But neither could she break the line. The bushes separated while she

struggled, and a vast silence befell.

Jean straightened slowly.

"You're a prize angler," she said.

The young fellow's bewilderment gave way to an expansive smile.

"I quite agree with you," he admitted. "I ought to have a blue ribbon,

or a pewter mug, or whatever they give the duffer who lands the biggest

catch. Let me help you with those hooks. I hope they haven't torn your

dress?"

Then the blue-and-white check drew him. The girl's eyes had held him

first; next, her brows; afterward, her contrasting hair. The uniform

compelled his gaze to significant details--the shawl, the coarse shoes,

the fallen cup.

Jean flushed under his scrutiny, and brusquely declined his help.

"No, but let me," he urged, and so humbly that she relented.

"I know more about these things than you do," she said. "Do you know

you're trying several kinds of fishing with one line?"

"Oh, yes," he smiled. "You see I haven't a notion what sort of fish

frequent these waters, and fish vary a lot in their tastes. Some

prefer worms, some have a cannibal appetite for minnows, and some, I

believe, like a little bunch of colored feathers, which can't be very

nourishing, I must say. I couldn't make up my mind which bait to use,

and so I spread a kind of lunch-counter for all comers."

This was too much for Jean's gravity. The fisherman was unruffled by

her laughter. In fact, he laughed with her.

"Is it so preposterous as all that?" he asked. "I didn't know but I'd

hit on something new. This tackle doesn't belong to me; it's the other

fellow's."

Jean's glance shot past him. The man saw and understood.

"We planned to camp together," he explained, "but a telegram

overtook him on the train. It was highly inconsiderate in a mere

great-grandmother to pick out just this time for her funeral. I look

for him to-morrow or the day after."

Jean freed her dress at length and searched for her belongings. The

young man stooped also. He was too late for the shawl, but gravely

restored the tin cup. She thanked him, as gravely, and after a little

pause added:--

"The least you can do is to say nothing."

"About seeing you?"

"Yes."

"You're from the other side of the county?"

"Yes."

"From the--" he hesitated.

"From the House of Refuge," stated Jean, looking him squarely in the

face.

His own gaze was as direct.

"But not that sort," he commented softly, as if thinking aloud--"not

that sort."

Jean, boy-like, offered her hand.

"Thank you," she said simply. "You're quite right. That's exactly why

I'm running away. Good-by."

"Don't go!" He detained her hand, his face full of sympathy and

perplexity. "I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am. It would be hard

lines for a fellow, but when I see a girl"--his eyes added: "And such a

girl!"--"roaming the country like a--a homeless--"

"Hobo?" supplied Jean.

He reddened guiltily.

"Hang it all!" he ended, "I can't stand it. You hit the nail on the

head when you told me that the least I can do is to say nothing. But I

trust that isn't all I can do. I want to help."

The girl's eyes misted.

"You have helped, you believe in me."

"Who wouldn't!" His bearing challenged the world.

"Several people. My family, for instance; most of the officials back

there at the refuge. But never mind that."

"No," agreed her new champion. "Never mind that. Let's face the future,

the practicalities."

Jean complied with despatch.

"Your bacon is burning," she announced.

He led the way to his camp, and together they surveyed the charred ruin

in the spider. Jean could have devoured it as it lay.

"And it's my first warm meal," lamented the camper tragically--"my

first warm meal after five days of canned stuff! The other fellow was

to be cook as well as fisherman."

Jean promptly mastered the situation.

"Clean that spider while I slice more bacon," she directed, rolling up

her sleeves. "If you have potatoes, wash about a dozen."

The victim of a canned diet flung himself blithely into the work, but

halted suddenly, halfway to the water, and brandished the spider in air.

"Not a mouthful unless you'll eat too?" he stipulated.

Jean gave a happy laugh.

"Perhaps I can be pressed," she conceded.

With a facility which would have amazed the refuge, and with a secret

pride in her new knowledge which she had little dreamed she could come

to feel, Jean set the bacon and potatoes frying, evolved a plate of

sandwiches from soda crackers and a tin of sardines, discovered a jar

of olives which their owner had forgotten, and arranged the whole upon

a box-cover laid with a napkin. Nor was this the sum of the miracle.

She even garnished the meat with a handful of watercress which she

spied and bade her admiring host gather in a neighboring brook.

They said little during the meal, for both were famished; but while

they washed the dishes together by the shore Jean, under questioning,

sketched the story of her flight. Her listener's ejaculations gained

steadily in vigor, till ultimately, moved by a startling thought, he

dropped the plate he was polishing.

"Look here!" he cried. "Have you had a wink of sleep?"

"I got in an hour about the middle of the forenoon."

"One hour out of thirty!"

"It was enough."

"I'll sling the hammock anywhere you say."

"I was never more wide awake. There are too many things to think out

and plan."

"Take the hammock, anyhow," he urged. "You can plan and rest, too."

She let herself be so far persuaded, and he brought pillows from the

tent. As she let herself relax, she first realized how weary she had

become, and closed her eyes that she might taste the full luxury of

rest. The rhythmic chuckle of the little brook where the watercress

grew was ineffably soothing. It seemed almost articulate, an elfish

voice to which the small waves, lapping the shore, played a delicate

accompaniment. She dreamily fitted words to its chant, and presently,

still smiling at the conceit, strayed quite into the delectable land

where water-sprites are real, and beautiful impossibilities matter of

fact.

The shadows had lengthened when she woke. Her companion sat with his

back to a tree trunk as before, but she perceived that he had stretched

a bit of canvas to screen her from the slanting sun.

"It was best all round," he said, as she sprang up reproachfully. "It

did you good and gave me leisure to think. I felt sorrier than ever

while you lay there, smiling and dimpling in your sleep, like a child."

"I despise that dimple," avowed Jean, disgustedly.

"You despise it!"

"It's so--so feminine."

"Of course it is; that is no reason for abusing it."

"I think it's a mighty good reason. A dimple will be a great handicap

in my life."

[Illustration: "A dimple will be a great handicap in my life."]

"Great Jupiter!" said the young man softly. "Why, some girls I know

would give--But we can't discuss dimples, just now, can we? What I

began to say, before you took my breath away, was that I think I've

solved the clothes problem. You know there's a town about ten miles

to the north--the county seat--and it occurs to me that if I set out

to-night, I can be back here early in the morning with everything

you'll need. I don't believe they'll suspect me, even if they have

happened to read that a refuge girl has escaped. I can buy the skirt

in one store, the hat in another, and so on, pretending they're for my

sister--or my wife."

Jean's refractory dimple deepened.

"Make it your mother," she advised. "Wives and sisters prefer to do

their own shopping."

"Very well, then. If you will jot down the measurements and other

technicalities, I'll manage it somehow. As for money," he added,

perceiving her falter, "I will take care of that, too, if you'll allow

me. You will naturally need a loan."

Jean swallowed a lump.

"You're a brick," she said huskily. "I'll pay you back with the first

money I earn."

The brick received her praise with a change of color appropriate to his

title.

"Any fellow would be--be glad to help, you know," he stammered. "And

you needn't feel that you must hurry to pay up, either. Wait until

you're well settled among your friends."

"My friends! I have none."

"No friends!" He stared blankly. "Of course I realized that you could

hardly go back home, but I took it for granted that there must be some

place--somebody--"

"There isn't."

He sat down abruptly, bewildered with the complexities which beset an

apparently simple situation. Jean herself began to entertain some

misgiving. For the moment his opinion epitomized the world's.

"Where do you mean to go?" he asked.

"Across the state line first; then to New York."

"New York!"

"Yes; to find work. Why do you stare as if I'd said Timbuctoo?"

"I'm from New York."

"Are you?" She brightened wonderfully. "Then you can tell me where to

find work. I'm willing to do anything at the start, but by and by I

want to get into some good business. Women are succeeding in business

on all sides nowadays. Why do you look so hopeless? Don't you think I

can get on?"

"How can I answer you! If there were only some woman to whom I might

take you. I've a sister, but--"

"But she wouldn't understand?"

"No, she wouldn't understand. Neither do you understand," he went on

anxiously. "To be a stranger in New York, homeless, friendless, without

work, the shadow of that place over there dogging your steps; with you

what you are--trustful, unsuspicious, open as sunlight--Oh, I daren't

advise you. I don't dare."

Jean was awed, but not downcast.

"I'll risk it," she replied stoutly.

Twice he opened his lips to speak, but rose instead and paced among the

trees. Finally he confronted her.

"Why not go back?" he asked.

Jean widened her eyes upon him.

"Go back! Go back to the refuge?"

"Yes. Why not go back and see it through? No, no," he entreated, as her

lip curled. "Don't think I'm trying to squirm out of my offer. That

stands. It's you I'm considering. Remember that no matter how much you

may make of yourself those people over there will have the power to

take it from you. Should you marry--"

"I shall never marry."

"Should you marry--ah! you will--they can shame you and the man whose

name you bear. Could you stand that? After all, isn't the other way

better? Wouldn't a clean slate be worth its price?"

She shook her head.

"You don't realize what you ask. I can't go back. I can't. You don't

know."

"I suppose I don't," he admitted.

"I'd rather run the risk--the risk of their finding me, the risk,

whatever it is, of New York. As for friends--" she smiled upon him

radiantly--"well, I'll have you."

"Yes," he promised. "You'll have me."

He accepted her decision, and at once made ready for his tramp across

the hills. At parting he reminded her that to him she was still

nameless.

"I'm not sure myself," she laughed. "I'll need a new name in New York!"

"But now?"

"Well, then--Jack."

"To offset the dimple, I suppose. Is it short for Jacqueline?"

"No; just Jack."

Jean's knight errant looked back once before the tree-boles shut her

wholly away. She had dropped upon a log and was facing the blue reach

of the lake. This was about six o'clock in the evening. At nine she had

not shifted her position. It was perhaps an hour later when she sprang

up abruptly, lit a candle which he had shown her in arranging for the

night, and hunting out a pencil and paper, wrote a hurried note which

she pinned to the tent-flap.

There were but two lines in all. The first thanked him. The second

ran:--

"I've gone back to see it through."

V

The refuge, considered officially, was impressed. That any fugitive,

let alone one who had outwitted pursuit, should freely present herself

at the gatehouse, spiced its drab annals with originality. Jean

Fanshaw, no less than Sophie Powell, had achieved distinction. The

refuge dissembled its emotion, however. An escape was an escape, with

draconic penalties no more to be stayed than the march of a glacier or

the changes of the moon.

But even the refuge--from the vantage-point of a supposed ventilator

reached by a secret stair--discerned that the prisoner of the

guardhouse was unaccountably not the rebel of Cottage No. 6. The girl

who dropped from the window would have found this duress maddening.

Four brick walls were its horizon; its furnishing was a mattress

thrust through a grudging door at night and withdrawn when the dim

glow, filtering through a ground-glass disk in the ceiling, heralded

the return of another day. It was always twilight within, for the

occupations of a guardhouse require little light. Text-books, no other

print, were sometimes permitted, but even these arid pastimes were not

for Jean; the school taught nothing she had not mastered. Her resources

were two: she might knit or she might think. She usually chose the

latter.

Another thing puzzled the refuge--still considered officially. It was

no novelty for a song to rise to the pseudo-ventilator (inmates so

punished often sang out of bravado when first confined), but it was

quite unprecedented for a girl with no couch but the floor, no outlook

save the walls, no employment except knitting, companioned solely by

her thoughts, to croon the words of a rollicking popular air as if she

were content.

Jean, too, wondered unceasingly. Why had her old ideas of life

cheapened? Save one chance stranger, men had met her on the footing

of boyish good-fellowship which she required of them: why should this

no longer seem wholly desirable? Why had she relished a chivalrous

insistence on her sex? Why had she taken pride in the practice of a

menial feminine art? Why had all things womanly shifted value? Why,

above all, did she feel no regret that these things should be? Yet

content was scarcely the word for her frame of mind. Her thoughts were

a yeasty ferment out of which the unknown youth of the forest, whose

very name was a mystery, began presently to emerge as an ideal figure.

And this ideal man had on his part a conception of ideal womanhood!

Here was the germinal truth at last.

While she pondered, two solitary weeks which by popular account should

have been unspeakable, slipped magically away. She dreaded their end,

for she knew that in the adamantine scheme of things six months of

prison life, at very least, awaited her. Even to the average refuge

girl the prison signified degradation; to Jean it also spelled Stella

Wilkes. The abhorred contact did not begin at once, however, since

it fell out that in runaway cases the powers were wont to decree

yet another fortnight of isolation following the transfer from the

guardhouse. But isolation in the prison was a relative term. The

building's sights could be shut away; its sounds penetrated every

cranny.

Such sounds! One of them broke Jean's light slumber her first night

under the prison roof. It was a strand in the woof of her dreams at

first, a monotonous, tuneless plaint, strangely exotic, like nothing

earthly except the wailing of savage women who mourn their dead. She

lay half awake for an interval, the weird chant clutching at her heart.

Then, as it rose, waxing shriller with each repetition, she sat bolt

upright with hair prickling and flesh acreep. It was a menace to the

living, not a requiem; a virulent explicit curse.

"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"

The prison stirred.

"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"

Here a woman laughed; there one began softly to echo the cry; cell

warily hailed cell.

"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"

The pulsing hate of it now filled the corridors. A door opened

somewhere, and a metallic footfall began to echo briskly from iron

stairs.

"Is it mesilf ye're wantin', darlin'?" called a fat-throated voice.

"I'll not keep ye waitin'. With ye in a jiffy!"

There was a sound of shooting bolts, a brief scuffle, the click of

handcuffs, and a ragged retreat. Presently a door slammed, and the

matron's steps alone retraced the lower corridors. Far in the distance,

muffled by intervening walls, its two emphatic words only audible,

the eerie defiance still rose and untiringly persisted until it again

entered the fabric of Jean Fanshaw's dreams.

That cry somehow struck the dominant note of the prison. Its

bitterness, its mental squalor, its agonizing repression, its

smouldering revolt, all focussed in that hysterical out-burst against

constituted authority. Jean heard it again and again in the ensuing

months, and in each instance it broke the stillness of night. The

second time it startled, but did not frighten. The third she thrilled

to its message, knowing it at last for her own fiery heartache made

articulate. But this was afterward.

In the beginning Stella Wilkes overshadowed their background. She

and Jean had had a grammar-school acquaintance in the days before

respectability and the Wilkes girl--as Shawnee Springs knew her--parted

company; and it was to this period of democratic equality and relative

innocence to which Stella chose sentimentally to revert when she first

found a chance to speak.

"Can't say I feel a day older than I did then," she went on, sociably.

"Do I look it?"

Jean made some answer. Stella indeed seemed no different; looking a

mature woman at sixteen, she had simply marked time since. A mole,

oddly placed near one corner of her mouth where another girl would

dimple, still fascinated by its unexpectedness. Stella noticed this and

laughed.

"Remember how all you little kids used to rubber at my mole?" she

said. "It made me mad. I don't care now when people stare, but I wish

it was on my neck. 'Moles on the neck, money by the peck,' you know.

Queer, ain't it, that two of us from the old West Street school should

strike this joint together? It's just the same as if we'd gone away to

college--I don't think! Any Shawnee Springs news to tell?"

"No," Jean answered, stonily.

Stella saw that her advances were unwelcome, and her mood veered.

"That's your game, is it?" She thrust her hard face closer. "So I ain't

in your class, my lady--you that was so keen for the boys! You give

me a pain. As if near the whole kit of us wasn't pinched for the same

reason. Go tell the marines you're any better than the rest!"

It was Jean's first sharp conception of the brutal truth that the

stigma of the reformatory was all-embracing. The world presently

emphasized the stern lesson. True to her word on learning of the

censorship, she had never written home; but her mother's letters,

formal and mutilated as they were, had nevertheless meant more to

her than she realized until her degradation to the prison lopped

this privilege too away. The cumulative effect of Mrs. Fanshaw's

correspondence, when finally read, was not tonic. Despite the censor,

Jean gathered that Shawnee Springs now linked her name with Stella

Wilkes's. A refuge girl was a refuge girl; degrees and shadings of

misconduct lost themselves in the murky sameness of the stain. Her

grateful wonder grew that her champion of the forest had had the

insight to distinguish. His quixotic young faith and a heartening word

now and then from Miss Archer, when some infrequent errand brought the

little secretary near, between them redeemed humanity.

A torrid summer dragged into an autumn scarcely less enervating. The

kitchen-gardens were arid; the grass-plots sere; the scant wisps of

ivy wherewith Miss Archer, unsanctioned by the state, had attempted to

soften the more glaring shortcomings of the architect, hung dead beyond

all hope of resurrection; and the endless reaches of brick wall, soaked

in sunshine by day, reeked like huge ovens the live-long night. The

officials' tempers grew short, their decisions arbitrary beyond common;

obedience became daily more difficult; riot, full-charged, awaited only

its galvanizing spark.

This the prison contributed. Conditions were always hardest here, and

the rage they fostered had gathered itself into an ominous hatred

of the matron. Nor was this wholly due to her chance embodiment of

law. That carried weight, of course, but the prime factor in her

unpopularity was a stolid cynicism implanted by some years' prior

service in a metropolitan police station. Joined to a temperament like

the superintendent's, this could have been endured, though detested;

but the former matron of a "sunrise court" mixed her doubt with a

lumbering joviality against which sincerity beat itself in vain. Her

smile was a goad; her laugh a stinging blow.

The revolt turned upon an old grievance. Breakfast was a scant meal in

the prison, and the laundry squad, upon which the severest toil fell,

had for months clamored for a mid-forenoon luncheon. This request was

reasonable, but an intricate knot of red tape, understood clearly by

nobody, had balked its granting, and the matron accordingly reaped a

whirlwind which others had sown. All the week it threatened. On Monday

perhaps half the workers in the laundry, headed by Stella Wilkes,

repeated the old demand, and were sent about their business with heavy

sarcasm.

"Lunch, is it!" drawled the matron, with her maddening grin. "Sure

it's Vassar College, or Bryn Mawr maybe, these swells think they're

attendin'! How triggynomtry, an' dead languidges, an' the pianoforty do

tire the brain! Wouldn't you find a club sandwich tasty, young ladies?

Or a paddy-de-foy-grass, now? Back to your tubs!"

Jean took no part in the demonstration, and as the Wilkes girl returned

to her work she cursed her for a chicken-hearted coward. Since the day

of her rebuff she had worn her enmity like a chip upon her shoulder.

Jean met this, as she now met everything, with apathy. Stella, her

unlovely associates bending over the steaming tubs, the nagging

matron--one and all had their being in an unreal world, a nightmare

country, which must be stoically endured until the awakening. The

tomboy had become a mystic.

With this detachment she incuriously watched the rising storm. From

Tuesday to Thursday the unrest spent itself in note-writing, a

diversion, following Rabelaisian models in style, which was, of course,

forbidden. The contraband pencils found ingenious hiding-places,

however, and the notes themselves a lively circulation. One of these

missives, written by Stella and mailed with a scuttleful of fresh coal

in the laundry stove, fell under Jean's eye Thursday afternoon. It was

intended for another, but some delay had bungled its delivery, and the

flames unfolded it and betrayed its secret. Stella saw and pressed

close.

"If you blab, I'll kill you," she threatened hoarsely. "That's

straight."

Jean shrugged her away. She attached no weight to the scrawl's

ungrammatical hints of violence. Such vaporings were as common as

they were idle. Nor was she moved when, on Friday, during recreation,

the matron's alertness checked, though it failed truly to appraise,

a catlike dart of Stella's to the rear. She did not escape, however,

a certain sympathetic share in the tension which set the last day

of the week apart from other days. The nerves of a reformatory are

high-pitched. To be always dumb unless bidden to speak, forever aware

of a spying eye, eternally the slave of Yea and Nay--such is the

common lot. Double the feeling of repression, and you get the prison

and hysteria. From the rising-bell, Saturday, till she slept again,

Jean's senses were played upon by vague malign influences. All felt

them. If sleeve brushed sleeve, a scowl followed; muttered curses sped

the passing of every dish at meals; and in the stifling night some one

raised the heart-clutching chant against the matron. This was the time

Jean hailed it for her own.

Sunday brought no relief. The piping heat held unabated; hard work,

the week-day safety-valve, was lacking. Only the matron could muster

a smile. That smile! The prison file, passing, chapel bound, in

Sunday review, felt the heat hotter and life more bitter because of

it. The eyes of one girl blinked nervously; the fingers of a second

spread clawlike, then clenched; the jaws of another set. If that woman

laughed! The quadrangle peopled rapidly. Every building spun its

blue-gray thread into the paths. The earliest comers were quite at

the chapel steps when the prison girls, issuing from their frowning

archway last, swung reluctantly into the treeless glare. Their smiling

matron stood just within the shadow, looking exasperatingly cool in

her white linen, and outrageously at peace with herself and her smug,

well-ordered world. Then, abruptly, some trifle--perhaps a missing

button, possibly a curl where should be puritanic simplicity, nothing

more significant--loosed her sarcasm, her laugh and revolt.

A cry, different from the midnight defiance, yet as terrible, burst

from one of the prison girls. Shrill, bird-like, prolonged, it was

such a sound as the tortured captive at the stake may have heard from

the encircling squaws. It was well known in the refuge; decade had

bequeathed it to decade; and it was always the signal of mutiny. As

throat after throat took it up, the commands of the matrons became

mere angry pantomime. Rank upon rank melted in confusion, and the mob,

lusting for violence, awaited only its directing fury.

A leader rose. Stella had secretly fomented this outbreak; it was her

storm to ride openly if she dared. Yet it was scarcely a question of

daring. This was her supreme hour, hers by right of might; and had

another seized the lead she would have crushed her. With black locks

tumbled, eyes kindled, cheeks afire, wanting only the scarlet gear of

anarchy to cap her likeness to those women of other speech who braved

barricades like men, she rallied disorder about her as the fiercer

flame draws the less. Her following flocked from every quarter of the

quadrangle--high-grade girls, girls but just clear of the guardhouse;

the mature in years, the tender; the froward, the meek; spawn of the

tenements, wayward from the farm; beggars, vagrants, drunkards, felons,

wantons, thieves. Hysteria answering to hysteria, madness to madness,

like filings to the magnet they came, and, among them, Jean.

[Illustration: And, among them, Jean.]