Transcriber’s Note Italic text displayed as: _italic_ WITHIN THESE WALLS [Illustration: Decoration] WITHIN THESE WALLS By RUPERT HUGHES _Author of_ “SOULS FOR SALE,” “CLIPPED WINGS” “THE THIRTEENTH COMMANDMENT” “WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY” [Illustration: Decoration] HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1923 WITHIN THESE WALLS Copyright, 1923 By Harper & Brothers Printed in the U.S.A. _First Edition_ ILLUSTRATIONS “HOW WICKED WE ARE! HOW WICKED!” _Facing p._ 90 THE SUNLIGHT THAT MADE A SHIMMERING AUREOLE ABOUT HER FLASHED IN HER EYES, SHINING WITH THE TEARS OF RAPTURE ” 118 “SWEAR THAT YOU WILL NEVER MENTION JUD LASHER’S NAME TO ANYBODY” ” 156 WITHIN THESE WALLS WITHIN THESE WALLS CHAPTER I He called that tulip tree “the bouquet of God,” because it was more like a Titan’s handful of flowers than a tree. Yet it stood a hundred and fifty feet high, and the stem of it was so large that a man and a girl together could just touch hands about its bole by stretching their arms to full length in a double embrace, and leaning their cheeks against its bark, deep-fluted as a Corinthian column. This afternoon it meant a torch of welcome on the peak of the last hill; and it was stirred into yellow flame by the breeze that stroked its multitudinous blossoms. Beneath it, the house looked small, cuddling in the shadow, its roof all pied yellow and green with the fallen saffron petals of the orange-stained tulip cups, with the stripped sheaths of leaf and flower, and the broad, blunt, glossy leaves, and the pistils and stamens shredded and powdery. To David RoBards the house was home, and never so much home as now that he fled to it with his bride from New York, and from the cholera that had begun another of its grisly pilgrimages about the world. Leaving its religious home in India and traversing Asia and Europe, it had finally stridden overseas to Canada; drifted across the lakes to the new village of Chicago, and descended the Mississippi to devastate New Orleans. In the meanwhile it had crept down the Hudson to where New York’s two hundred thousand souls waited helpless and shuddering. Invisible devils of pestilence were darting everywhere now, wringing the vitals of the city to an agony, and flinging rich and poor to the cobblestones in such foul and twisted anguishes that the scavengers recoiled, and the nearest of kin or of love shrank away with gorges rising and bowels melting, not with pity, but with fear. In Bellevue Hospital the dead lay on the floor so thickly strewn that the overworked physicians could hardly move about among them. And the nurses detailed from the prison took to drink and fought across the beds of the dying or slept off their liquor on a mattress of corpses.