ast days, even during those last hours, Theodore
deliberately prevented himself from allowing his mind to dwell on his
father. He did not know how much the latter had been told, and he had
no wish to know. A wall of silence had arisen between the two who had
always been so much, nay, in a sense, everything, to one another. Each
feared to give way to any emotion, and yet the son knew only too well,
and was ashamed of the knowledge, with what relief he would part from
his father. There had been a moment when Major Lane had intimated his
belief that the two would go away and make a new life together, but
Theodore Carden had put aside the idea with rough decision. Perhaps
when he was far away, on the other side of the world, the former
relations of close love and sympathy, if not of confidence, might be
reestablished between his father and himself, but this, he felt sure,
would never be while they remained face to face.

And now he was lying wide awake in the darkness, in the pretty,
peaceful room which had once been his nursery, and where he had spent
his happy holidays as a schoolboy. His brain remained abnormally
active, but physically he was oppressed by a great weariness;
to-night, for the first time, Carden felt the loathsome wraith which
haunted him, if not less near, then less malicious, less watchful than
usual, above all, less eager to assert her power.... Yet, even so, he
lay very still, fearing to move lest he should once more feel about
his body the clinging, enveloping touch he dreaded with so great a
dread.

* * * * *

And then, quite suddenly, there came a strange lightening of his
heart. A space of time seemed to have sped by, and Carden, by some
mysterious mental process, knew that he was still near home, and not,
as would have been natural, in New Zealand. Nay, more, he realised
that the unfamiliar place in which he now found himself was Winson
Green Gaol, a place which, as a child, he had been taught to think of
with fear, fear mingled with a certain sense of mystery and
excitement.

Theodore had not thought of the old local prison for years, but now he
knew that he and his father were together there, in a small cell
lighted by one candle. The wall of silence, raised on both sides by
shame and pain, had broken down, but, alas! too late; for, again in
some curious inexplicable way, the young man was aware that he lay
under sentence of death, and that he was to be hanged