seems like it. You wrong me in one thing--in thinking my sorrow is sham and prompted by fear and the hope of getting off. I cannot find words to express my contrition. Believe me, I would do anything in my power, and will do, when my term is up, to make reparation. I submit to the inevitable. I can imagine something now of what you must have suffered when I left you alone without food or money those four days and nights. I think, however, the worst thing I did was telling the pastor's daughter that you tried to prevent our meeting because you wished me to marry one of your sisters, though I do not know, of course, whether you have any even. That, and the taking the stamps off your letters so that I could get beer, seem to weigh most heavily with me now in my darkness and loneliness. I do not know what my sentence will be--heavy, I suspect, unless I can get someone to plead for me, and I have not a single solitary friend to do that. I am utterly alone. I have been in this cell now twenty-one days, and have a week more before sentence is given. It seems like six months. No one can realize what prison is like till they have tried it.
Believe me, I am deeply and truly sorry. I speak from my heart. Think of me as kindly as you can when I am in the Penitentiary. I hope I shall see you once more.
Arthur B.
I saw Boyde twice in my life afterwards; I heard, indirectly, from him once: the prison chaplain wrote to ask for "his things" which, Boyde told him, I "insisted upon keeping." He never had any "things" at all while I knew him; the letter was indignant and offensive. Boyde had evidently "told a tale" to the chaplain.
The first time I saw him was some eighteen months after he had been sent up, good behaviour evidently having shortened his term. I was walking up Irving Place and saw him suddenly about fifty yards in front of me. It was my own thick suit I recognized first, then its wearer. I instinctively called out his name. He turned, looked at me, hurried on, and went round the corner into 21st Street. Once round the corner, he must have run like a hare, for when I entered the street too, he had disappeared.
The second, and last, time I saw him was in London ten years later--at a bookstall in Charing Cross station. He saw me, however, first, or before I could come close
enough to speak, and he melted away into the crowd with
