an irresistible desire to catch him by the
arm and look in his face.

"Ah! you have not forsaken me," the greeting leaped out.

"Not now," said Rinaldo.

"Do you think of going?"

"I will speak to you presently, my friend."

"Hound!" cried Wilfrid, and turned his face to the wall.

Until he slept, he heard the rapid travelling of a pen; on his awakening,
the pen vexed him like a chirping cricket that tells us that cock-crow is
long distant when we are moaning for the dawn. Great drops of sweat were
on Rinaldo's forehead. He wrote as one who poured forth a history without
pause. Barto's wife came to the lamp and beckoned him out, bearing the
lamp away. There was now for the first time darkness in this vault.
Wilfrid called Rinaldo by name, and heard nothing but the fear of the
place, which seemed to rise bristling at his voice and shrink from it. He
called till dread of his voice held him dumb. "I am, then, a coward," he
thought. Nor could he by-and-by repress a start of terror on hearing
Rinaldo speak out of the darkness. With screams for the lamp, and cries
that he was suffering slow murder, he underwent a paroxysm in the effort
to conceal his abject horror. Rinaldo sat by his side patiently. At last,
he said: "We are both of us prisoners on equal terms now." That was
quieting intelligence to Wilfrid, who asked eagerly: "What hour is it?"

It was eleven of the forenoon. Wilfrid strove to dissociate his
recollection of clear daylight from the pressure of the hideous
featureless time surrounding him. He asked: "What week?" It was the first
week in March. Wilfrid could not keep from sobbing aloud. In the early
period of such a captivity, imagination, deprived of all other food,
conjures phantasms for the employment of the brain; but there is still
some consciousness within the torpid intellect wakeful to laugh at them
as they fly, though they have held us at their mercy. The face of time
had been imaged like the withering mask of a corpse to him. He had felt,
nevertheless, that things had gone on as we trust them to do at the
closing of our eyelids: he had preserved a mystical remote faith in the
steady running of the world above, and hugged it as his most precious
treasure. A thunder was rolled in his ears when he heard of the flight of
two months at one bound. Two big months! He would have guessed, at
farthest, two weeks. "I have been two months in one shirt? Impossible!"
he exclaimed. His serious idea (he cheris