Two gentlemen in white flannels were playing croquet; stout elderly gentlemen they were. And on a garden seat a young man in flannel trousers and a grey tweed coat was seated watching the game and smoking cigarettes. He guessed these people to be fellow prisoners. They looked happy enough, and having noticed this fact he sat down to breakfast. He noted that the knife accompanying his fork was blunt and of very poor quality--of the sort warranted not to cut throats, but he did not heed much. He had other things to think of. The men in flannels had given him a shock. Instinctively he knew them to be "inmates." He had never considered the question of lunatics and lunatic asylums before. Vague recollections of Edgar Allan Poe and the works of Charles Reade had surrounded the term lunatic asylum with an atmosphere of feather beds and brutality; the word lunatic conjured up in his mind the idea of a man obviously insane. The fact that this place was a house quite ordinary and pleasant in appearance, and these sane looking gentlemen lunatics, gave him a grue. The fact that an apparently sane individual can be held as a prisoner was beginning to steal upon him, that a man might be able to play croquet and laugh and talk and take an intelligent interest in life and yet, just because of some illusion, be held as a prisoner. He did not fully realise this yet, but it was dawning upon him. But he did fully realise that he had lost his liberty. Before he had finished his eggs and bacon this recognition became acute. The fear of losing his own personality had vanished utterly; all that haunting dread was gone. If he could escape now, so he told himself, he would go right back to the States. He had eight thousand pounds in the National Provincial Bank; no one knew that it was there. He could seize it with a clear conscience and take it to Philadelphia. The shadow of Rochester--oh, that was a thing gone forever, dissipated by this actual fact of lost liberty--so he told himself. A servant brought up the _Times_ and he opened it, and lit a cigarette. Then as he looked casually over the news and the doings of the day, an extraordinary feeling came upon him; all this printed matter was relative to the doings and ideas of free men, men who could walk down the street, if the fancy pleased them. It was like looking at the world through bars. He got up and paced the floor, the breakfast things had been removed, and the attendant had left the room and was in the bed-room adjoining. Jones walked softly to the door through which the servant had carried away the things, and opened it gently and without noise. A corridor lay outside, and he was just entering it when a voice from behind made him turn. "Do you require anything, sir?" It was the attendant. "Nothing," said Jones. "I was just looking to see where this place led to." He came back into the room.