ent would snatch him out of
reach, and then he smiled.

"I am in the prison at Omdurman," he said, "actually in the prison! This
is Umm Hagar, the House of Stone. It seems too good to be true."

He leaned back against the wall with an air of extreme relief. To
Trench the words, the tone of satisfaction in which they were uttered,
sounded like some sardonic piece of irony. A man who plumed himself upon
indifference to pain and pleasure--who posed as a being of so much
experience that joy and trouble could no longer stir a pulse or cause a
frown, and who carried his pose to perfection--such a man, thought
Trench, might have uttered Feversham's words in Feversham's voice. But
Feversham was not that man; his delirium had proved it. The
satisfaction, then, was genuine, the words sincere. The peril of Dongola
was past, he had found Trench, he was in Omdurman. That prison house was
his longed-for goal, and he had reached it. He might have been dangling
on a gibbet hundreds of miles away down the stream of the Nile with the
vultures perched upon his shoulders, the purpose for which he lived
quite unfulfilled. But he was in the enclosure of the House of Stone in
Omdurman.

"You have been here a long while," he said.

"Three years."

Feversham looked round the zareeba. "Three years of it," he murmured. "I
was afraid that I might not find you alive."

Trench nodded.

"The nights are the worst, the nights in there. It's a wonder any man
lives through a week of them, yet I have lived through a thousand
nights." And even to him who had endured them his endurance seemed
incredible. "A thousand nights of the House of Stone!" he exclaimed.

"But we may go down to the Nile by daytime," said Feversham, and he
started up with alarm as he gazed at the thorn zareeba. "Surely we are
allowed so much liberty. I was told so. An Arab at Wadi Halfa told me."

"And it's true," returned Trench. "Look!" He pointed to the earthen bowl
of water at his side. "I filled that at the Nile this morning."

"I must go," said Feversham, and he lifted himself up from the ground.
"I must go this morning," and since he spoke with a raised voice and a
manner of excitement, Trench whispered to him:--

"Hush. There are many prisoners here, and among them many tale-bearers."

Feversham sank back on to the ground as much from weakness as in
obedience to Trench's warning.

"But they cannot understand what we say," he objected in a voice from
which the ex