"If you don't think me already mad, you will before I'm through." Like a caged wild thing that can not be still, she was once more on her feet, vibrating back and forth like a shuttle. "I'm afraid of myself at times, afraid of the future. It's like the garret used to be after dark, when we were children: it holds only horrors. "Child, child!" She paused, her arms folded across her breast, her throat a-throb. "You can't understand--thank God, you never will understand--what the future holds for me. You are going back home; back to your own people, your own life. You've been here but a few months. To you it has been a lark, an outing, an experience. In a few short weeks it will be but a memory, stowed away in its own niche, the pleasant features alone remaining vivid. "Even, while here, you've never known the life itself. You've had Jack, the novelty of a strange environment, your anticipation of sure release. You are merely like a sightseer, locked for a minute in a prison-cell, for the sake of a new sensation. "You can't understand, I say. You are this, and I--I am the life-prisoner in the cell beyond, peering at you through the bars, viewing you and your mock imprisonment." Once more the speaker was in motion, to and fro, to and fro, in the shuttle-trail. "The chief difference is, that the life-prisoner has a hope of pardon; I have none--absolutely none." "Mollie"--pleadingly, "you mustn't. I'll ask Jack to give Steve a place at home, and you can go--" "Go!" The bitterness of her heart welled up and vibrated in the word. "Go! We can't go, now or ever. It's death to Steve if we leave. I've got to stay here, month after month, year after year, dragging my life out until I grow gray-haired--until I die!" She halted, her arms tensely folded, her breath coming quick. Only the intensity of her emotion saved the attitude from being histrionic. In a sudden outburst, she fiercely apostrophized: "Oh, Dakota! I hate you, I hate you! Because I am a woman, I hate you! Because I would live in a house, and not in this endless dreary waste of a dead world, I hate you! Because your very emptiness and solitude are worse than a prison, because the calls of the living things that creep and fly over your endless bosom are more mournful than death itself, I hate you! Because I would be free, because I respect sex, because of the disdain for womanhood that dwells in your crushing silence, I hate--oh, my God, how I hate you!" She threw her arms wide, in a frantic gesture of rebellion. "I want but this," she cried passionately: "to be free; free, as I was at home, in God's country. And I can never be so here--never, never, never! Oh, Annie, I'm homesick--desperately, miserably homesick! I wish to Heaven I were dead!" Annie Warren, child-woman that she was, was helpless, when face to face with the unusual. Her senses were numbed, paralyzed. One thought alone suggested itself. "But"--haltingly--"for Steve's sake--certainly, for him--"