ss to her, bespoke his further favor for Cowperwood--"a very great
man," as she described him, which sealed that ambitious materialist's
fate completely. There was nothing the overseer would not do for the
young lady in the dark cloak. She might have stayed in Cowperwood's cell
for a week if the visiting-hours of the penitentiary had not made it
impossible.

The day that Cowperwood decided to discuss with his wife the weariness
of his present married state and his desire to be free of it was some
four months after he had entered the prison. By that time he had become
inured to his convict life. The silence of his cell and the menial tasks
he was compelled to perform, which had at first been so distressing,
banal, maddening, in their pointless iteration, had now become merely
commonplace--dull, but not painful. Furthermore he had learned many of
the little resources of the solitary convict, such as that of using his
lamp to warm up some delicacy which he had saved from a previous meal or
from some basket which had been sent him by his wife or Aileen. He had
partially gotten rid of the sickening odor of his cell by persuading
Bonhag to bring him small packages of lime; which he used with great
freedom. Also he succeeded in defeating some of the more venturesome
rats with traps; and with Bonhag's permission, after his cell door had
been properly locked at night, and sealed with the outer wooden door, he
would take his chair, if it were not too cold, out into the little back
yard of his cell and look at the sky, where, when the nights were clear,
the stars were to be seen. He had never taken any interest in astronomy
as a scientific study, but now the Pleiades, the belt of Orion, the Big
Dipper and the North Star, to which one of its lines pointed, caught his
attention, almost his fancy. He wondered why the stars of the belt of
Orion came to assume the peculiar mathematical relation to each other
which they held, as far as distance and arrangement were concerned,
and whether that could possibly have any intellectual significance. The
nebulous conglomeration of the suns in Pleiades suggested a soundless
depth of space, and he thought of the earth floating like a little ball
in immeasurable reaches of ether. His own life appeared very trivial
in view of these things, and he found himself asking whether it was all
really of any significance or importance. He shook these moods off with
ease, however, for the man was possessed of