"Tell her you'll take any message to her friends," Singleton suggested to the girl over his shoulder.
"Her friends?"
He was staring out at glimpses of stone wall. "I should say"—he spoke in his most detached manner—"I should say, you'd have a rather interesting half-hour, particularly if you let her unburden her soul on the subject of her—allies."
The car stopped. Singleton got out, and rang a bell. The car was drawn up close against a massive gray wall. Just beyond was a great iron-studded door. In a moment it opened. A man stood there who looked to the irreverent eye like the jailer in a comic opera—a big, saturnine man with an enlarged waist (or an enlargement where his waist might have been), and round this great girth of his a broad belt with the largest keys hanging to it Nan had ever seen out of a pantomime. She asked afterward if they were real keys. She thought that, like the halberds of the Beefeaters, they must be symbolic, "just to impress on people the degree of the locked-upness they'd got to expect here." As to the jailer himself, he, like his keys, was "too good to be true." He wasn't only like an actor. His forbidding manner, his black-avised scowl, and gruff voice, had for the eyes at the car window exactly the same air of unreality as the keys. To Singleton's horror, she confided presently that it was all she could do not to applaud and call out of the window, "Isn't he doing it well!" with the mental reservation that really he was overdoing it.
The basso profundo with the keys stood frowning at the paper Singleton had presented.
"Is she here?" demanded the jailer.
"Oh, yes, I'm here." Nan nodded and beckoned at him out of the window. He gave her a yet more frightful scowl, and she nearly burst out laughing as Singleton, in the act of helping her out, saw, to his consternation.
The scowling giant showed them into a bare little room with an open fire and a chair in front of a table, where a big book like a ledger lay open. Between table and fire was a telephone; all round the walls were benches; nothing else.
The basso profundo left them there in front of the fire. A warder passed the door with a man in prison clothes who was carrying a bucket. The warder spoke to the man. What he said was not intelligible, but the quality of voice struck the light-minded smile from Nan Ellis's face.
"How he spoke!"