But Dale started up in his bed and stretched out his hands. "No, you mustn't do that, Sir Reginald. You mustn't do it. Your boy must never see my daughter again—never!"
"Why not?" Sir Reginald asked, laying his hand on the old man's shoulder.
Dale looked at him with haggard eyes. "Don't you know? Your son is in love with Marjorie. He wants to make her his wife!"
Sir Reginald Crichton started and turned away: "My God!" he said under his breath. "I never suspected that! You're right, Dale, I'm afraid they must never meet again. I'm sorry—but it's impossible. Any thought of marriage. Utterly impossible now!"
CHAPTER XIII.
THE IRONY OF FATE.
Rupert found that four weeks in prison was a lifetime.
His experience at Holloway before the trial helped him not at all; though he remembered now, that at the time, it had shocked and horrified him. Yet the cruelty and ugliness had all been on the surface. Looking back on it now, after four weeks of the real thing, with the eyes of a professional, he saw the humorous as well as the dramatic side of it.
If Holloway had been under the direction of the manager of a Drury Lane melodrama it could not have been run on lines better calculated to excite the common mind, and arouse the curiosity and the mirth of the vulgar. It had all been very cheap and dramatic. The great gates, barred and bolted in primeval fashion; the uniformed warders and wardresses, obviously chosen for their stature and their lack of humanity. The clanging of bells and the rattling of great bunches of keys. The herding together of guilty and innocent in pen-like places. The coming and going of numerous officials.
The real thing was very different. It had not got the glamour of Holloway, or its melodramatic atmosphere with a dash of pantomime. There was an atmosphere of "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," about Wormwood Scrubbs, though the interior of the prison was not so depressing as the exterior—the Scrubbs itself.