The girl considered. "I think it was right for him to die," she said, but she was sorry about Joseph. In a little while the baby would be taken from her and put into a state institution. She was maternal--primitively maternal--and her real punishment was not imprisonment but separation from her child. Lydia saw this without entirely understanding it. The girl had said to her: "I suppose you can't imagine killing anyone?" Lydia assured her that she could--oh, very easily. She went back to her room thinking that she was more a murderess at heart than this girl, who was now nothing but a mother. When she came out of the hospital she was not put back at the schoolroom work but was sent to the kitchen. This was an immense tiled room which gave the impression to those who first entered it of being entirely empty. Then the eye fell on a row of copper containers--three of them as tall as she--one for tea, one for coffee, one for hot water, and three smaller pots, round like witches' caldrons, for the cooking of cereals and meats and potatoes. The baking was done in an adjacent alcove. There Lydia was put to work. Gradually the process began to interest her--the mixing of the dough and the baking of dozens of loaves at a time in a great oven with rotating shelves in it. The oven, like all ovens, had its caprices, dependent upon the amount of heat being used by the rest of the institution. Lydia set herself to master the subject. A certain strain of practical competence in her had never before had its expression. CHAPTER XIV As Lydia began to emerge from her depression she clung to Evans, who had first made her see that she could not think anything human alien to herself. The disciplined little Englishwoman, sincere and without self-pity, seemed the purveyor of wisdom. She saw her own mistakes clearly. William--William was the pale young footman, about whom they talked a good deal--had urged her for a long time to pick up a ten-dollar bill now and then or a forgotten bit of jewelry. She had never felt any temptation to do so until Lydia had been so indifferent about the loss of the bracelet. What was the use of caring so much about the safety of the jewels if the owner cared so little? "Oh, that bracelet!" murmured Lydia, remembering how she had last seen it in O'Bannon's hand in court. For a moment she did not follow what Evans was saying, and came back in the midst of a sentence. "----and made me see that because you were wrong that did not make me right. Then I got ready to confess. He made me see that the real harm was done and over when I took a thing that wasn't mine, and that the only way to get back was to obey the law and go to prison and get through with it as quick as I could. I owe a lot to him, Lydia--not that he preached at me, but his eyes looked right into me." "Of whom are you speaking?" Lydia asked sharply. "Of Mr. O'Bannon," answered Evans, and a reverent tone came into her voice.