nd he could not forget Father Beron with his monotonous phrase, "Will
you confess now?" reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of
meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could
not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in the
street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he would have quailed
before him. This contingency was not to be feared now. Father Beron was
dead; but the sickening certitude prevented Dr. Monygham from looking
anybody in the face.

Dr. Monygham had become, in a manner, the slave of a ghost. It was
obviously impossible to take his knowledge of Father Beron home to
Europe. When making his extorted confessions to the Military Board,
Dr. Monygham was not seeking to avoid death. He longed for it. Sitting
half-naked for hours on the wet earth of his prison, and so motionless
that the spiders, his companions, attached their webs to his matted
hair, he consoled the misery of his soul with acute reasonings that he
had confessed to crimes enough for a sentence of death--that they had
gone too far with him to let him live to tell the tale.

But, as if by a refinement of cruelty, Dr. Monygham was left for months
to decay slowly in the darkness of his grave-like prison. It was no
doubt hoped that it would finish him off without the trouble of an
execution; but Dr. Monygham had an iron constitution. It was Guzman
Bento who died, not by the knife thrust of a conspirator, but from a
stroke of apoplexy, and Dr. Monygham was liberated hastily. His fetters
were struck off by the light of a candle, which, after months of gloom,
hurt his eyes so much that he had to cover his face with his hands. He
was raised up. His heart was beating violently with the fear of this
liberty. When he tried to walk the extraordinary lightness of his feet
made him giddy, and he fell down. Two sticks were thrust into his hands,
and he was pushed out of the passage. It was dusk; candles glimmered
already in the windows of the officers' quarters round the courtyard;
but the twilight sky dazed him by its enormous and overwhelming
brilliance. A thin poncho hung over his naked, bony shoulders; the rags
of his trousers came down no lower than his knees; an eighteen months'
growth of hair fell in dirty grey locks on each side of his sharp
cheek-bones. As he dragged himself past the guard-room door, one of the
soldiers, lolling outside, moved by some obscure impulse, leaped forward
with