The Prisoner

								


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  THE PRISONER

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY


NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO


MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED


LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.


TORONTO

  THE PRISONER


BY


ALICE BROWN


AUTHOR OF "MY LOVE AND I," "CHILDREN OF
EARTH," "ROSE MACLEOD," ETC.

  New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916


All rights reserved

  Copyright, 1916
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY


Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1916
Reprinted June, 1916 July, 1916 Twice August, 1916.

THE PRISONER

I

There could not have been a more sympathetic moment for coming into the
country town--or, more accurately, the inconsiderable city--of Addington
than this clear twilight of a spring day. Anne and Lydia French with
their stepfather, known in domestic pleasantry as the colonel, had hit
upon a perfect combination of time and weather, and now they stood in a
dazed silence, dense to the proffers of two hackmen with the urgency of
twenty, and looked about them. That inquiring pause was as if they had
expected to find, even at the bare, sand-encircled station, the imagined
characteristics of the place they had so long visualised. The handsome
elderly man, clean-shaven, close-clipped, and, at intervals when he
recalled himself to a stand against discouragement, almost military in
his bearing, was tired, but entrenched in a patient calm. The girls were
profoundly moved in a way that looked like gratitude: perhaps, too,
exalted as if, after reverses, they had reached a passionately desired
goal. Anne was the elder sister, slender and sweet, grave with the
protective fostering instinct of mothers in a maidenly hiding, ready to
come at need. She wore her plain blue clothes as if unconscious of them
and their incomplete response to the note of time. A woman would have
detected that she trimmed her own hat, a flat, wide-brimmed straw with a
formless bow and a feather worthy only in long service. A man would
have cherished the memory of her thin rose-flushed face with the crisp
touches of sedate inquiry about the eyes. "Do you want anything?" Anne's
eyes were always asking clearly. "Let me get it for you." But even a man
thus tenderly alive to her charm would have thought her older than she
was, a sweet sisterly creature to be reverentially regarded.
Lydia was the product of a different mould. She was the woman, though a
girl in years and look, not removed by chill timidities from woman's
normal hopes, the clean animal in her curved mouth, the trick of parting
her lips for a long breath because, for the gusto of life, the ordinary
breath wouldn't always do, and showing most excellent teeth, the little