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.] VI Stella hailed the recruit with shrill satisfaction, clutched her by the arm lest her allegiance falter, and beckoned on her amazons. "Smash the prison first," she screamed. "We'll show 'em."