I want you to understand, if you can, something of what my feelings were at that time. I had gone into that place fiercely rebelling against my fate; I had gone into it young, with the fierce hot blood of life beating in my veins. Twenty years of it had tamed me and broken me; it had been a gradual process, but a sure one nevertheless. Slowly the rot of the prison had eaten into my soul; slowly and surely I had sunk to be what I was--a thing obedient to orders, and expecting always to have life measured out in scanty regular doses for my daily consumption. Now, in a moment, I had been flung upon the world; small wonder that I turned in fear and trembling to the first creature that called me by name, and spoke a decent word to me that was not a command. I had been tossed out into the world after twenty years; I was fumbling feebly to find my place in it--and this man might be able to tell me. So I went with him down the long hill into the town; and I felt even then that I went with the trot that had been mine in the exercise yard of the prison. We came down into the pleasant little place; there were buxom women standing at the doors of the little houses, and whistling boys in the streets, and children trooping along on their way to school. By that time I had hold of my companion's arm, the better to keep up with his easier stride; I turned with him willingly enough into a little inn in a side street of the town, where, in a quiet room where we were alone, he ordered breakfast. When the smoking food was put before me I laughed, and clapped my hands like a child. He did not eat much himself; but he seemed greatly amused and interested at seeing me eat, and seemed, too, to understand what I felt. "That puts life into you, doesn't it?" he asked, peering at me across the table. "That makes you young again, and ready to face the world--eh?" I nodded gratefully, although I knew that it was my money that had paid for the meal. When I had eaten all I could, he leaned across the table towards me, and looked at me closely. I smiled at him in a friendly way, because I felt that he had been good to me. "Charles Avaline--how old are you?" I thought for a moment, and remembered what the governor had said to me before I left the prison. "I was a mere boy of twenty when I went in there," I said, "and I have lived there for twenty years." "A simple sum in arithmetic," said my companion, with a grim laugh. "There's a looking-glass over the fireplace," he added, pointing to it; "look at it, and see what has happened to you in twenty years, my man of forty!"