Singleton said he didn't notice anything unusual, but he was rather relieved that she had stopped smiling. When the head jailer came back, he had a wardress in tow. The jailer didn't speak, didn't even look at the two waiting.
"This way," said the woman, and led Miss Ellis briskly down a long stone corridor. Another wardress stood by a door slightly ajar.
"Be quick," she said to some one inside. "I can't wait here all day."
"She speaks just as the warder spoke to the man with the bucket," Nan thought. "Does anybody speak like that to Greta?" They wouldn't do it twice, she decided, even before the reconciling phrase "First-class Prisoner" recurred to her. She imagined Greta turning these wooden women into human beings with a lash of her tongue.
Going up the skeleton stairs Nan broke the echoing silence. "Does Miss—the lady know I'm coming?" she asked in a low voice.
Stolidly pursuing her way, the wardress looked straight in front of her for so long, Nan thought, as she told Napier afterward, that the woman wasn't going to speak at all. But when she had sufficiently marked the fact that she wasn't there to answer questions she said, with that same hard tonelessness, "I don't know who'd tell her." Through more corridors they passed till the wardress stopped just short of an open door and rang a bell. A younger woman of the same type came round a corner.
"Tell ninety-six she's to come down," Nan's guide called out, but she went to meet the other wardress, and the two stood talking a moment. They seemed to resent the visitor's inquiring eyes. "That's where you go," said the older one over her shoulder. Nan found, to her surprise, that the direction was addressed to her, with a curt motion of the head toward the open door. As she entered, the door closed behind her. Nan's heart began to thump. "What if they take me for a prisoner, and no one comes to put them right!" she thought. Her spirits had been steadily sinking ever since she heard the warder speaking to the prisoner with the bucket. Mr. Singleton had been wrong. Even for a prisoner of the first class this was a terrifying place. She remembered something she had read once that a captive in the Tower had said centuries ago, "'T is not the confined air; 't is the Apprehension of the place." It was just that. The atmosphere was thick, choking with apprehension. How long "96" was in coming down! On reflection, it was almost consoling that after that rough message Greta should take her time. Nan rested on the confident faith that, when Greta came, the Apprehension would lessen, if not vanish altogether, vanishing before that dauntless step.
This room was even barer than the other: no fire, no open book, no telephone; only a long, narrow table down the middle, several stout wooden chairs, a window heavily barred, nothing else. Sounds outside came muffled, and the more charged with Apprehension for that. What was happening?
The door opened. A glimpse of the tall wardress shutting herself out and shutting in a squat figure clad in shapeless gray serge garments and a foolish cap.
Greta? That?