sleep or
eat. He was absorbed in one idea.

Michael was not a thinker. He was a man of action, whose action, sharp,
rapier-like, and instantaneous, was unsheathed only by instinctive
feeling, by chivalry, honour, indignation, compassion, never by
reflection, judgment, experience. He could not really think. What he
learned had to reach him some other way. His mind only bungled up
against ideas, hustled them, so to speak, till they turned savage.

He sat idly in his cell when his work was done. There was a kind of
pressure on him, as if the walls were closing in on him. Sometimes he
got up, and pushed them back with his hands.

The sun had shifted his setting as the winter drew in, and for a few
minutes every afternoon laid a thong of red light upon his wall. He
looked at it sternly while it burned. It looked back sternly at him.

He had no wish to be free now, no wish for anything.

The doctor came to see him, and looked closely at him, and spoke kindly
to him. He was interested in the young Englishman, and, like several of
the warders, was convinced of his innocence.

Michael took no notice of him, barely answered his questions. He was
impatient of any interruption.

He was absorbed in one thought.

He had loved Fay for a long time. How long was it? Five years? Ten
years? Owing to his peculiar fate love had usurped in Michael's life too
large a place, the place which it holds in a woman's life, but which is
unnatural in a man's. He did not know it, but he had travelled a long
way on the road towards an entire oblivion of Fay when he came to Rome.
But the one great precaution against her he had not taken. He had not
replaced her, and "Only that which is replaced is destroyed." He had
grown accustomed to loving her.

In these days he went over, slowly, minutely, every step of his long
acquaintanceship with her, from the first day, when he was nineteen and
she was seventeen, to the last evening six years later, when he had
kissed the cold hand that could have saved him, and did not.

Old people, wise old learned people, smoke-dried Dons and genial bishops
sitting in their dignified studies, had spoken with guarded frankness to
him in his youth on the temptations of life. They had told him that
love, save when it was sanctified by marriage, was only a physical
passion, a temporary madness, a fever which all men who were men
underwent, but to which a man of principle did not succumb, and which if
vigorously suppr