"Just the opposite. All pure white souls are criminals--all of us are criminals at heart. The only way not to be is to recognize the fact that you are. It's a terrible idea at first--at least it was to me. It was like going through death and coming out alive." Lydia paused, staring before her, and anyone in the world except Eleanor would have thought she had finished; but Eleanor's fine ear caught the beat of an approaching idea. "But it's such a comfort, Nell, to belong to the tribe--such a relief. And I should never have had it if it had not been"--she hesitated, and Eleanor's heart contracted with a sudden fear that the name of O'Bannon was about to enter--"if it had not been for my accident." Eleanor was not sure that Lydia had deliberately avoided the name. What, she wondered, was left of that unjust and bitter hatred? She could not detect a trace of bitterness anywhere in Lydia's nature to-night. But then she had always had those moments of gentleness. Presently Miss Bennett came in to say in her old, timid, suggestive manner that it was late--she hated to interrupt them, but she really did think that Lydia ought to go to bed. Lydia got up at once. "I suppose I ought," she said. "It's been an exciting day for me." Eleanor noted that such a suggestion from Miss Bennett in old days would have meant that Lydia would have felt it her duty to stay up another hour. "I have to, my dear," she would have said, "or else Benny would be trying to coerce me in every detail of my life." CHAPTER XVI The next morning at the regular prison hour Lydia woke with a start. She had been aware for some time of a strange unaccountable roaring in her ears. She looked about her, surprised to see that the light of dawn was not falling through a tall barred aperture at the head of her bed, but was coming across a wide carpeted room from two chintz-curtained windows. Then she remembered she was at home; the roaring was the habitual sound of a great city; the room was the room she had had since she was a child. It seemed less familiar to her, less homelike, than her cell. She put out her hand to the satin coverlet and the sheets, softer than satin. The physical sensation of the contact was delicious, and yet there was something sad about it too. It was the thought of her late companions that made her sad, as if she had deserted them in trouble. It would be two hours or more before Eleanor and Benny would be awake. She flung her arms above her head and lay back, thinking. She mustn't let them cherish her as if she were a wounded, stricken creature. She was more to be envied now than in the old fighting days, when all her inner life had been a sort of poisoned turmoil. No one had pitied her then.