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.
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 thecountry town—or, more accurately, the inconsiderable city—of Addingtonthan this clear twilight of a spring day. Anne and Lydia French withtheir stepfather, known in domestic pleasantry as the colonel, had hitupon a perfect combination of time and weather, and now they stood in adazed silence, dense to the proffers of two hackmen with the urgency oftwenty, and looked about them. That inquiring pause was as if they hadexpected to find, even at the bare, sand-encircled station, the imaginedcharacteristics of the place they had so long visualised. The handsomeelderly man, clean-shaven, close-clipped, and, at intervals when herecalled himself to a stand against discouragement, almost military inhis bearing, was tired, but entrenched in a patient calm. The girls wereprofoundly moved in a way that looked like gratitude: perhaps, too,exalted as if, after reverses, they had reached a passionately desiredgoal. Anne was the elder sister, slender and sweet, grave with theprotective fostering instinct of mothers in a maidenly hiding, ready tocome at need. She wore her plain blue clothes as if unconscious of themand their incomplete response to the note of time. A woman would havedetected that she trimmed her own hat, a flat, wide-brimmed straw with aformless bow and a feather worthy only in long service.[Pg 4] A man wouldhave cherished the memory of her thin rose-flushed face with the crisptouches of sedate inquiry about the eyes. "Do you want anything?" Anne'seyes were always asking clearly. "Let me get it for you." But even a manthus tenderly alive to her charm would have thought her older than shewas, a sweet sisterly creature to be reverentially regarded.
Lydia was the product of a different mould. She was the woman, though agirl in years and look, not removed by chill timidities from woman'snormal hopes, the clean animal in her curved mouth, the trick of partingher lips for a long breath because, for the gusto of life, the ordinarybreath wouldn't always do, and showing most excellent teeth, the littlesquare chin, dauntless in strength, the eyes dauntless, too, and hairall a brown gloss with high lights on it, very free about her forehead.She was not so tall as Anne, but graciously formed and plumper.Curiously, they did not seem racially unlike the colonel who, to theirpassionate loyalties, was "father" not a line removed. In the delicacyof his patrician type he might even have been "grandfather", for helooked ol