Vol.1 f.060 recto

games of [???] the prison children as they whooped and ran, and played at hide-and-seek, and made the iron bars of the inner gateway “Home.”

Wistful and wondering, she would sit in summer weather by the high fender in the lodge, looking up at the sky through the barred window until [?? ?a??ing] [?????????? ?? ??s]
[??? ??????? ??? ?????] bars of light [?????] would arise [???????????] when she turned [??? ???] her eyes away, between her and her friend and
[???? ????] she would see him through a grating too.

“Thinking of the fields,” the turnkey said once, after watching her, “ain’t you?”

“Where are they?” she inquired.

“Why, they’re—over there, my dear,” said the turnkey, with a vague flourish of his key. “Just about there.”

“Does anybody open them, and shut them? Are they locked?”

The turnkey was discomfited. “Well,” he said. “Not in general.”

“Are they very pretty, Bob?” She called him Bob, by his own particular request and instruction.

“Lovely. Full of flowers. There’s buttercups, and there’s daisies, and there’s”—the turnkey hesitated, being short of floral nomenclature—"there’s dandelions, and all manner of games.”

“Is it very pleasant to be there, Bob?”

“Prime,” said the turnkey.

“Was father ever there?”

“Hem!” coughed the turnkey. “O yes, he was there, sometimes.”

“Is he sorry not to be there now?”

“N-not particular,” said the turnkey.

“Nor any of the people?” she asked, glancing at the listless crowd within. “O are you quite sure and certain, Bob?”

At this difficult point of the conversation, Bob gave in and changed the subject to hard-bake: always his last resource when he found his little friend getting him into a political, social, or theological corner. But this was the origin of a series of Sunday excursions that these two curious companions made together. They used to issue from the lodge on alternate Sunday afternoons with great gravity, bound for some meadows or green lanes that had been elaborately appointed by the turnkey in the course of the week; and there she picked grass and flowers to bring home, while he smoked his pipe. Afterwards, there were tea-gardens, shrimps, ale, and other delicacies and then they would come back hand in hand unless
she was more than usually tired and had fallen asleep on his shoulder.

In those early days the turnkey first profoundly began to consider a question
which cost him so much mental labour that it remained undetermined on the day of his death.
He decided to will and bequeath his little property of savings to his godchild, and the point arose how
could it be so “tied up” as that only she should have the benefit of it? His experience on
the lock gave him such an acute perception of the enormous difficulty of “tying up” money
with any approach to tightness, and contrariwise of the remarkable ease with which it
got loose that through a series of years he regularly propounded this knotty point to every new insolvent agent and other
professional gentleman who passed in and out.