My fear at first had been that I might lose what refinement I had; I strove passionately to remember what I had been--to be always something better than those with whom I was herded. I believe I was a model prisoner; I read all that I could from the prison library, and I wrote when they would let me. After a time I began to write of that first part of my life--the free part; I was afraid that in the dull course of the years I might forget. Although at first the remembrance of what I had been and what I had done were strongly with me, in time it all narrowed down to the figure of Barbara, and rested there; nor would my recollection turn to anything else. And during all those twenty years, wherein time did not stand still with me, she never changed; in my remembrance she was always the bright pretty girl of eighteen years of age whom I had loved so long before. It was as though she had died, and I had remembered what she was at the last. And it is safe to say that she was always with me. Not that the wall of my prison ever went down, as it had done once when I lay condemned to death; that vision never came to me again. But in the night I dreamed of her--a mad impossible dream--that she waited somewhere near at hand--always young and beautiful, and always loving me--waited until such time as I should, by a miracle, get out into the world again. In the first years of my imprisonment I dreamed that, over and over again; but no other figure out of the past came to me--at least, not after my first remembrance of the world had worn off. In time, as the years went on, it seemed as though, as I grew older, a sort of mental mist descended over all that life I had led before my trial--so that things were blurred, and I did not see them distinctly. Mercifully, too, I grew to take an interest in the work I did inside the prison walls; to be keen and anxious to do it well, and to do it better than my fellows. The prison life had worn and broken me, and I know that I was prematurely old, and a little feeble and fretful compared with what I should have been. And I was shocked one day when, in the tinsmith's shop, I got a brief vision of myself in a shining sheet of tin; I was old and haggard, and the little hair I had was quite grey. It frightened me; and I know that I lay awake that night, thinking bitterly of the years that had been stolen from me, and trying to remember how old I was. Then the time came, quite unexpectedly, when I was set free. I cannot now write of that time, or think of it, without remembering how frightened I was, or how strange the sensation of freedom seemed to me. I had noticed that something was different--had feared that something was going to happen--because they had not cropped my hair for a little time, and would give me no explanation; and then at last one morning--one bitter winter morning, when I flogged myself with my arms to keep myself warm--I was sent for to the governor's room.