he felt it a labour to draw his breath in
it. The sensation of being stifled sometimes so overpowered him, that
he would stand at the window holding his throat and gasping. At the
same time a longing for other air, and a yearning to be beyond the blind
blank wall, made him feel as if he must go mad with the ardour of the
desire.

Many other prisoners had had experience of this condition before him,
and its violence and continuity had worn themselves out in their cases,
as they did in his. Two nights and a day exhausted it. It came back by
fits, but those grew fainter and returned at lengthening intervals. A
desolate calm succeeded; and the middle of the week found him settled
down in the despondency of low, slow fever.

With Cavalletto and Pancks away, he had no visitors to fear but Mr and
Mrs Plornish. His anxiety, in reference to that worthy pair, was that
they should not come near him; for, in the morbid state of his nerves,
he sought to be left alone, and spared the being seen so subdued and
weak. He wrote a note to Mrs Plornish representing himself as occupied
with his affairs, and bound by the necessity of devoting himself to
them, to remain for a time even without the pleasant interruption of
a sight of her kind face. As to Young John, who looked in daily at a
certain hour, when the turnkeys were relieved, to ask if he could do
anything for him; he always made a pretence of being engaged in writing,
and to answer cheerfully in the negative. The subject of their only
long conversation had never been revived between them. Through all these
changes of unhappiness, however, it had never lost its hold on Clennam's
mind.

The sixth day of the appointed week was a moist, hot, misty day. It
seemed as though the prison's poverty, and shabbiness, and dirt, were
growing in the sultry atmosphere. With an aching head and a weary heart,
Clennam had watched the miserable night out, listening to the fall of
rain on the yard pavement, thinking of its softer fall upon the country
earth. A blurred circle of yellow haze had risen up in the sky in lieu
of sun, and he had watched the patch it put upon his wall, like a bit of
the prison's raggedness. He had heard the gates open; and the badly shod
feet that waited outside shuffle in; and the sweeping, and pumping,
and moving about, begin, which commenced the prison morning. So ill and
faint that he was obliged to rest many times in the process of getting
himself washed, he had at le