peeta's will imposed upon him. And so, while he
did not dare to approach her in person, he determined to put his case to
a final test, and if he could not win her back to leave forever a place
in which he was doomed to suffer perpetual torment.

In the execution of this purpose, he wrote her a letter in which, after
passionately pleading for her love, he asked her to give him a sign of
willingness to take him once more back into her life. "If I may cherish
hope of your ultimate relenting," he wrote, "place your candle on the
window sill. I will wait until midnight, and if you extinguish it then,
I shall accept your decision as final, and you will be responsible for
what follows. I am a desperate man, and life without you has become
intolerable."

With this letter in his hand, he waited until the street was quiet and
the halls of the tenement house deserted, and then crept up the long
staircase with trembling knees.

On tiptoe he picked his way across the corridor and slipped the note
under the door. So quietly did he step that he did not hear his own
footfall; but it did not escape the ears of the woman who sat stitching
her life into the garment lying upon her knees. There is often in a
footfall music sweeter than bird songs or harp tones.

Having thrust the letter under the door, David fled hastily down the
stairway and into the street, where he began to pace back and forth like
a sentry on his beat, never for a single instant losing sight of the
window whence streamed the feeble rays of the candle from which he was
to receive the signal of hope or despair.

Never did a condemned felon in a cell watch for the coming of a
messenger of pardon with more wildly beating heart than his as he gazed
at that window up in the wall of the gloomy tenement house. Never did a
mariner on a storm-tossed vessel keep his eye more resolutely fixed on
beams from a distant lighthouse.

It was then ten o'clock, and as he watched the slow-moving hands upon
the moonlit dial in the church tower, it seemed to him they were held
back by invisible fingers, and there came to his mind a forgotten story
of a man who, having been accidentally imprisoned in a sepulchre,
suffered in the twenty minutes which elapsed before his release all the
pangs of starvation, so powerfully was his imagination excited. This
story which he had once discredited he now believed, for it seemed to
him as if eternities were being crowded into single moments.

He h