Katherine, meantime, was wishing she had invented a headache, an appointment at the local dentist's, had even simulated a swoon at Colonel Bertram's feet, before she had consented to visit a prison. From the first moment of her entrance there the prison appalled her. It was a very nice prison, as prisons go. But the grating at the door, the locks that clicked, the polished keys, the polished handcuffs, the prison records which their host exhibited with so much ingenuous enthusiasm; the cells, one little cage after another in which human birds were pent. . . . "What have they all done?" she asked, as they walked along a stone-paved gallery; and wished she had not asked, for the details of horrible crimes were the last things she wished to hear. "Oh, petty felonies, mostly," said the governor, airily. It seemed more and more horrible to her that she and he and the governor should tread the mazes of this place free to come and go as they chose, while these other human beings, for whatever fault--and it seemed the faults could hardly rank as crimes--should be here encaged, never more to go out free till their penance should have purged them. "I suppose one mustn't give them anything?" "A little good advice wouldn't be amiss. 'Don't do it any more,' and so on. Would you like to give them an address, Mrs. Basingstoke?" She hated his badinage. "I mean tobacco or chocolate or books, or anything that they'd _like_," she explained, patiently. "No, no," said the governor. "They aren't pets, you know. Mustn't feed them through the bars as though they were rabbits or guinea-pigs. The townspeople _will_ throw tobacco over into the yard. Can't stop them. But of course we punish the offenders very severely whenever we manage to bring it home to them." The horrible sense of slavery grew on her--the prisoners were slaves to the warders, the warders slaves, and super-subservient slaves, to the governor, the governor himself a slave to some power unseen but all-potent. She watched her opportunity and while Colonel Bertram was explaining to Edward the method of the manufacture of post-office bags she opened her purse in her pocket and let all its contents fall loose, therein. Then she gathered the money in a handful, careful that no rattle or chink should betray her, and when the governor was explaining how wire netting, spread over each gallery to catch any object thrown from above rendered suicide difficult, if not impossible, she knotted the money in her handkerchief. Then she watched for further opportunity, hoping against hope, for it seemed that her chance would never come. There were eyes everywhere. "If I can't do it here, I'll buy tobacco and throw it over the wall," she told herself. It was in the kitchen that the chance came. Three prisoners were there acting as cooks, and the governor had sent the attendant warder on some errand, to order tea for them in his office, as events showed.