A fluent, sneering youth, who lashed the guards to
fury with his unctuous, diabolical tongue.
The penitentiary had not been moved then. It stood in the park, a
grim gray thing of stone. Elinor Cardew, a lonely girl always, used
to stand in a window of the new house and watch the walls. Inside
there were men who were shut away from all that greenery around them.
Men who could look up at the sky, or down at the ground, but never
out and across, as she could.
She was always hoping some of them would get away. She hated the
sentries, rifle on shoulder, who walked their monotonous beats, back
and forward, along the top of the wall.
Anthony's house was square and substantial, with high ceilings. It
was paneled with walnut and furnished in walnut, in those days. Its
tables and bureaus were of walnut, with cold white marble tops. And
in the parlor was a square walnut piano, which Elinor hated because
she had to sit there three hours each day, slipping on the top of
the horsehair-covered stool, to practice. In cold weather her German
governess sat in the frigid room, with a shawl and mittens, waiting
until the onyx clock on the mantel-piece showed that the three hours
were over.
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