To her real conqueror Stella at least made full and volcanic acknowledgment. The guardhouse alone stemmed the sulphurous eruption which she poured out upon Jean's past, present, and future; and the girls who heard shivered thankfully that another than themselves must drag out existence under the blighting fear of such a requital. The official attitude was more dispassionate. Barring now and again a puzzled glance, as at some insoluble riddle, the matron in no wise singled her preserver from the common run of mutineers to whom she meted out added rigors and penalties for their offence. Far from hastening her return to cottage life by her service in the cause of law and order, Jean learned that she had narrowly escaped doubling her prison term, and that the fact that the good in her conduct had been allowed to weigh over against the evil was deemed a piece of extraordinary clemency. Yet even if that brief reign of unreason had added a half-year of prison to the six months which a brief interval would round, its lesson would not have been dear-bought; for, as she had returned richer by a new conception of her womanhood from the flight of which the prison was the price, so now she wrung sanity from her yielding to madness. It terrified her that she could for one moment have become like these weak pawns in an incomprehensible game, and the recoil intrenched her in a fastness of self-control such as her girlhood had never conceived. Happily there came also at this time another influence no less wholesome and far-reaching. One morning of early winter she quitted the prison in charge of a clerk from the superintendent's office, who led the way to Cottage No. 6. Jean's heart sank as they crossed the threshold. In the optimism born of new resolutions she had hoped for a different lot. What availed new resolutions here! But she was no sooner within than she was conscious of a changed atmosphere. Bare as they were, the corridors seemed less institutional; the recreation hall, glimpsed in passing, smiled an almost animate greeting; while the room in which she was told to await the cottage matron's leisure resembled the room it had been in nothing save its four walls. Amy Jeffries, dusting the window-seat as if she enjoyed it, was actually humming. "Howdy!" she called. "Welcome home." Jean lifted a warning finger. "Somebody will hear," she cautioned. "Where will be your high grade then?" Amy grinned broadly. "Noticed it, did you?" She pivoted complacently before a mirror. "Don't I look for all the world like a trained nurse? Can't you just see me doing the wedding march with the grateful millionaire I've pulled through typhoid! Glory, but I am tickled to get out of checks!" Jean was vexed at her folly. "You'll get into them again mighty quick if she hears," she whispered. "Don't be a fool." "She!" Amy turned to stare. "Well, if you're not in from the backwoods! You don't mean to say you haven't heard that the Holy Terror is gone?"