s case."

But the voluble officer was not so easily silenced.

"So, to be sure, I gathered." He bowed gallantly to Dorothea. "'O
woman! in our hours of ease, Uncertain, coy, and hard to please'--not,
of course, that I attribute any such foibles to Miss Westcote, but for
the sake of the conclusion."

"Can we see him?"

"Eh? Before luncheon? Oh, most assuredly, if you wish it. He has been
transferred to the Convalescents' Ward. We will step across at once."
He drew from his pocket a small master-key, attached by a steel chain
to his belt, and blew into the wards thoughtfully while he studied the
paper handed to him by Endymion. "Quite in order, of course. No doubt,
you and Miss Westcote would prefer to break the good news to him in
private? Yes, yes; I will have him sent up to the Consulting Room. The
Doctor has finished his morning rounds, and you will be quite alone
there."

He picked up his cap and escorted them out and across the court to the
gate of the main prison. Beyond this Dorothea found herself in a vast
snowy yard, along two sides of which ran covered ways or piazzas open
to the air, but faced with iron bars, and behind these bars flitted the
forms of the prisoners at exercise, stamping the flagged pavement to
keep their starved blood in circulation. At a sight of the Commandant
with his two visitors--so small a spectacle had power to divert them--
all this movement, this stamping, was hushed suddenly. Voices broke
into chatter; faces appeared between the bars and stared.

"Yes," said the Commandant, reading Dorothea's thought, "a large family
to be responsible for! How many would you guess, now?"

"A thousand, at least," she murmured.

"Six thousand! Each of those blocks yonder will accommodate fifteen
hundred men. And then there is the hospital--usually pretty full at
this season, I regret to say. Come, I won't detain you; but really in
passing you must have a look at one of our dormitories."

He threw open a door, and she gazed in upon a long-drawn avenue of iron
pillars slung with double tiers of hammocks. The place seemed clean
enough: at the far end of the vista a fatigue gang of prisoners was
busy with pails and brushes; but either it had not been thoroughly
ventilated, or the dense numbers packed in it for so many hours a day
had given the building an atmosphere of its own, warm and unpleasant,
if not precisely foetid, after the pure, stinging air of the moorland.

"We can sleep seven hundr