was,
indeed, in gaol.

It was with a great start that he heard a voice speaking from the
silence--a harsh, yet cultivated voice, but he could not imagine which
of his companions was speaking. He had a vision of that man tormented
by the mental imprisonment of the darkness, trying to get away from his
ghosts and slimy enemies, goaded into speech in his own despite lest he
should be submerged and finally possessed by the abysmal demons. For a
while the voice spoke of the strangeness of life and the cruelty of
men to each other--disconnected sentences, odd words of selfpity and
self-encouragement, and then the matter became more connected and a
story grew in the dark cell "I knew a man," said the voice, "and he was
a clerk. He had thirty shillings a week, and for five years he had never
missed a day going to his work. He was a careful man, but a person with
a wife and four children cannot save much out of thirty shillings a
week. The rent of a house is high, a wife and children must be fed, and
they have to get boots and clothes, so that at the end of each week
that man's thirty shillings used to be all gone. But they managed to get
along somehow--the man and his wife and the four children were fed and
clothed and educated, and the man often wondered how so much could
be done with so little money; but the reason was that his wife was a
careful woman... and then the man got sick. A poor person cannot afford
to get sick, and a married man cannot leave his work. If he is sick
he has to be sick; but he must go to his work all the same, for if he
stayed away who would pay the wages and feed his family? and when he
went back to work he might find that there was nothing for him to do.
This man fell sick, but he made no change in his way of life: he got up
at the same time and went to the office as usual, and he got through the
day somehow without attracting his employer's attention. He didn't know
what was wrong with him: he only knew that he was sick. Sometimes he had
sharp, swift pains in his head, and again there would be long hours of
languor when he could scarcely bear to change his position or lift a
pen. He would commence a letter with the words 'Dear Sir,' forming the
letter 'D' with painful, accurate slowness, elaborating and thickening
the up and down strokes, and being troubled when he had to leave that
letter for the next one; he built the next letter by hair strokes and
would start on the third with hatred. The end o