to enter, any more than to those
who desire to get out. Their hinges never turn except by law. Ursus knew
this. Why, then, had he come there? To see. To see what? Nothing. Who
can tell? Even to be opposite the gate through which Gwynplaine had
disappeared was something.

Sometimes the blackest and most rugged of walls whispers, and some light
escapes through a cranny. A vague glimmering is now and then to be
perceived through solid and sombre piles of building. Even to examine
the envelope of a fact may be to some purpose. The instinct of us all is
to leave between the fact which interests us and ourselves but the
thinnest possible cover. Therefore it was that Ursus returned to the
alley in which the lower entrance to the prison was situated.

Just as he entered it he heard one stroke of the clock, then a second.

"Hold," thought he; "can it be midnight already?"

Mechanically he set himself to count.

"Three, four, five."

He mused.

"At what long intervals this clock strikes! how slowly! Six; seven!"

Then he remarked,--

"What a melancholy sound! Eight, nine! Ah! nothing can be more natural;
it's dull work for a clock to live in a prison. Ten! Besides, there is
the cemetery. This clock sounds the hour to the living, and eternity to
the dead. Eleven! Alas! to strike the hour to him who is not free is
also to chronicle an eternity. Twelve!"

He paused.

"Yes, it is midnight."

The clock struck a thirteenth stroke.

Ursus shuddered.

"Thirteen!"

Then followed a fourteenth; then a fifteenth.

"What can this mean?"

The strokes continued at long intervals. Ursus listened.

"It is not the striking of a clock; it is the bell Muta. No wonder I
said, 'How long it takes to strike midnight!' This clock does not
strike; it tolls. What fearful thing is about to take place?"

Formerly all prisons and all monasteries had a bell called Muta,
reserved for melancholy occasions. La Muta (the mute) was a bell which
struck very low, as if doing its best not to be heard.

Ursus had reached the corner which he had found so convenient for his
watch, and whence he had been able, during a great part of the day, to
keep his eye on the prison.

The strokes followed each other at lugubrious intervals.

A knell makes an ugly punctuation in space. It breaks the preoccupation
of the mind into funereal paragraphs. A knell, like a man's
death-rattle, notifies an agony. If in the houses about the
neighbourhood where a k