gather
his scattered senses or make reply.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE PRISONER

Harry King did not at once consult an attorney, for Milton Hibbard,
the only one he knew or cared to call upon for his defense, was an old
friend of the Elder's and had been retained by him to assist the
district attorney at the trial. The other two lawyers in Leauvite, one
of whom was the district attorney himself, were strangers to him.
Twice he sent messages to the Elder after his return, begging him to
come to him, never dreaming that they could be unheeded, but to the
second only was any reply sent, and then it was but a cursory line.
"Legal steps will be taken to secure justice for you, whoever you
are."

To his friends he sent no messages. Their sympathy could only mean
sorrow for them if they believed in him, and hurt to his own soul if
they distrusted him, and he suffered enough. So he lay there in the
clean, bare cell, and was glad that it was clean and held no traces of
former occupants. The walls smelled of lime in their freshly plastered
surfaces, and the floor had the pleasant odor of new pine.

His life passed in review before him from boyhood up. It had been a
happy life until the tragedy brought into it by his own anger and
violence, but since that time it had been one long nightmare of
remorse, heightened by fear, until he had met Amalia, and after that
it had been one unremitting strife between love and duty--delight in
her mind, in her touch, in her every movement, and in his own soul
despair unfathomable. Now at last it was to end in public exposure,
imprisonment, disgrace. A peculiar apathy of peace seemed to envelop
him. There was no longer hope to entice, no further struggle to be
waged against the terror of fear, or the joy of love, or the horror of
remorse; all seemed gone from him, even to the vague interest in
things transpiring in the world.

He had only a puzzled feeling concerning his arrest. Things had not
proceeded as he had planned. If the Elder would but come to him, all
would be right. He tried to analyze his feelings, and the thought that
possessed him most was wonder at the strange vacuity of the condition
of emotionlessness. Was it that he had so suffered that he was no
longer capable of feeling? What was feeling? What was emotion: and
life without either emotion, or feeling, or caring to feel,--what
would it be?

Valueless.--Empty space. Nothing left but bodily hunger, bodily
thirst, bodil