The latter injunction was unnecessary. Though Violet had for some time been excited by her escape, that excitement had already given place to utter exhaustion. The lamp had scarcely been extinguished before, with throbbing head, she passed into a sleep that was almost coma, and the lamp that was burning when she opened her aching eyes was the lamp of midmorning. She was alone and afraid to be alone. Her head seemed splitting. She saw the milk and rolls that Katie had set out for her on the oilcloth-covered table, but her stomach revolted at the thought of food, and her poisoned nerves cried out for alcohol. She got up and managed to pull on some of the clothes belonging to her two hostesses. From her first glance at the mirror, she drew back in bewilderment. During all her imprisonment she had been used, through her gradual change, to compare her morning appearance with that of her fellow slaves; but now there was fresh in her mind the standard, not of those pale and worn, though often fat and hardened, convicts, but of the pair of healthy girls that had, the night before, sheltered her; and from that standard her very image in the glass seemed to withdraw in horror. Lacking rouge, her cheeks, once so pink and firm, were pasty and pendant; her lips hung loose, her blue eyes were dull and blurred; even her hair appeared colorless and brittle. Little lines had formed at the corners of her eyes; her skin seemed rough and cracked, and other lines were already faintly showing from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. She sat down on the cot, sick and shivering. When she noticed a small pile of bedding in the corner behind the gas-stove, she shook at the memory of another such pile on another terrible morning, and by the time she had realized that one of her friends must have slept there in order to provide an extra couch, she was too wracked by suffering, physical and mental, to feel, at once, any great gratitude. The fever throbbed in her wrists, beat in her heart, hammered in her brain. She did not dare go to the street for whiskey or medicine. At every sound on the stairs she started up in the assurance that her keepers had come to recover her, and when, in the early afternoon, a loud knocking sounded on the door, she fell, in unresponding silence, before Katie's flaring lithograph of Our Lady of the Rosary. "Hello in there!" called a not overcautious voice. "I want to talk to Miss Violet!" Violet raised her clasped hands to the printed face before her. "Don't let them take me!" she whispered in a prayer to that visible sign of a power she had never before addressed. "Don't let them take me!" "Open up, can't you?" the voice insisted. "I know there's somebody inside, an', honest, I'm not going to hurt you!" Violet's hands fell. The voice, she realized, was at least unfamiliar. "Come on," it wheedled. "I'm all right; I'm from Mr. Dyker." "What do you want?" she inquired.