been able to understand. And he had come back to find her more lovely than ever, and wearing no mark of the inner cruelties he had suffered and had imagined she must share with him. He believed that his stay in prison had given him an illuminating idea of what hell really is: the vision of heaven and a certainty of the closed door. Confronted with an existence pared down to the satisfying of its necessities, he had loathed the idea of luxury while he hated the daily meagreness. Life had stopped for him when he entered inexorable bounds. It could not, he knew, be set going. Some clocks have merely stopped. Others are smashed. It had been the only satisfaction of his craving instincts to build up a scheme of conduct for the prison paper: but it had been the vision of a man lost to the country of his dreams and destined to eternal exile. Now all these aches and agonies of the past were lulled by the surge of tired muscles. He worked like a fury and the colonel, according to his strength, worked with him. They talked little, and chiefly about the weather prospects and the ways of the earth. Sometimes Anne would appear, and gently draw the colonel in, to advise her about something, and being in, he was persuaded to an egg-nog or a nap. But he also was absorbed, she saw, though he went at a slower pace than Jeff. He who had been old seemed to be in physical revolt; he was not sitting down to wait for death. He was going to dig the ground, even if he dug his grave, and not look up to see what visitant was waiting for him. It might be the earthly angel of a renewed and sturdy life. It might be the last summoner. But death, he told himself stoutly, though in a timorous bravado, waited for all. Jeffrey's manuscript was laid aside. On Sundays he was too tired to write, too sleepy at night. For Lydia and Anne, it was, so far as family life went, a time of arrested intercourse. Their men were planting and could not talk to them, or tired and could not talk then. The colonel had even given up pulling out classical snags for Mary Nellen. He would do it in the evening, he said; but every evening he was asleep. Lydia had developed an astounding intimacy with Madame Beattie, and Anne was troubled. She told Alston Choate, who came when he thought there was a chance of seeing her alone, because he was whole-heartedly sorry for her, at the mercy of the vagaries of the little devil, as he permitted himself to call Lydia in his own mind. "Madame Beattie," Anne said, "isn't a fit companion for a young girl. She can't be."