on, and
death, she would not have believed the accusation.

I sought out Mark Shrewsbury. He was at his chambers in Pump Court
working away with his type-writer; he had a fancy for working the old
year out and the new year in, and now he was in the full swing of that
novel which had suggested itself to his mind when Mrs. Selldon described
the rich and mysterious foreigner who had settled down at Ivy Cottage.
Most happily he laboured on, never dreaming that his careless words had
doomed a fellow-man to a painful and lingering death; never dreaming that
while his fingers flew to and fro over his dainty little keyboard,
describing the clever doings of the unscrupulous foreigner, another man,
the victim of his idle gossip, tapped dying messages on a dreary prison
wall.

For the end had come.

Through the evening Sigismund rested wearily on his truckle-bed. He
could not lie down because of his cough, and, since there were no extra
pillows to prop him up, he had to rest his head and shoulders against the
wall. There was a gas-burner in the tiny cell, and by its light he
looked round the bare walls of his prison with a blank, hopeless, yet
wistful gaze; there was the stool, there was the table, there were the
clothes he should never wear again, there was the door through which his
lifeless body would soon be carried. He looked at everything
lingeringly, for he knew that this desolate prison was the last bit of
the world he should ever see.

Presently the gas was turned out.

He sighed as he felt the darkness close in upon him, for he knew that his
eyes would never again see light--knew that in this dark lonely cell he
must lie and wait for death. And he was young and wished to live, and he
was in love and longed most terribly for the presence of the woman he
loved.

The awful desolateness of the cell was more than he could endure; he
tried to think of his past life, he tried to live once again through
those happy weeks with Gertrude; but always he came back to the aching
misery of the present--the cold and the pain, and the darkness and the
terrible solitude.

His nerveless fingers felt their way to the wall and faintly rapped a
summons.

"Valerian!" he said, "I shall not live through the night. Watch with
me."

The faint raps sounded clearly in the stillness of the great building,
and Valerian dreaded lest the warders should hear them, and deal out
punishment for an offence which by day they were forced to