"
"But dash it all," cried Fyne, "he isn't shut up for life. They are
going to let him out. He's coming out! That's the whole trouble. What
is he coming out to, I want to know? It seems a more cruel business than
the shutting him up was. This has been the worry for weeks. Do you see
now?"
I saw, all sorts of things! Immediately before me I saw the excitement
of little Fyne--mere food for wonder. Further off, in a sort of gloom
and beyond the light of day and the movement of the street, I saw the
figure of a man, stiff like a ramrod, moving with small steps, a slight
girlish figure by his side. And the gloom was like the gloom of
villainous slums, of misery, of wretchedness, of a starved and degraded
existence. It was a relief that I could see only their shabby hopeless
backs. He was an awful ghost. But indeed to call him a ghost was only a
refinement of polite speech, and a manner of concealing one's terror of
such things. Prisons are wonderful contrivances. Shut--open. Very
neat. Shut--open. And out comes some sort of corpse, to wander awfully
in a world in which it has no possible connections and carrying with it
the appalling tainted atmosphere of its silent abode.
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