Folly Corner

MRS. H. DUDENEY
AUTHOR OF “THE MATERNITY OF HARRIOTT WICKEN”
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1900
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY HENRY HOLT & CO.
THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS RAHWAY, N. J.

THE steam of that stifling London day rose up in a choking, enervating haze from the hot grass. The shrill cries of children, loose from the Board School, cut the thick air. A train rushed across the bridge. Two or three cyclists tinkled their bells irritably as they spun down Wood Lane to the Uxbridge Road, leaving a cloud of gray grit behind them. Omnibuses pulled up at the corner of the short street near the few newly-built shops. From Portobello Road came the heavy rumble of more traffic, mixed with the nearer shout of costers vending dried fish and over-ripe fruit.
She was a young woman. She stood still, in a limp, hopeless attitude, her face turned on Wormwood Scrubbs, her strained eyes vacantly fastened on the buildings, spires, and chimneys in the distance.
Some simple sound from the frowning prison on her left made her turn her head with the swift, watching movement of a cat. But there was nothing to see; no hint, no hope. Behind those walls! Her throat, rising white and firm from the tumbled collar of the cotton blouse, contracted. Those walls! those impenetrable walls! those relentless walls!
She put out two hands in baggy gloves; she held them up, flat palms upward, toward the speechless prison. Her attitude was one of strong appeal, of hope, almost—as if she half expected that despair would work a miracle. They stretched out, big, strong, shapeless in the old gloves—those quivering, appealing hands of hers.