il he slept, he heard the rapid travelling of a pen; on his
awakening, the pen vexed him like a chirping cricket that tells us that
cock-crow is long distant when we are moaning for the dawn. Great drops
of sweat were on Rinaldo's forehead. He wrote as one who poured forth
a history without pause. Barto's wife came to the lamp and beckoned him
out, bearing the lamp away. There was now for the first time darkness
in this vault. Wilfrid called Rinaldo by name, and heard nothing but
the fear of the place, which seemed to rise bristling at his voice and
shrink from it. He called till dread of his voice held him dumb. "I am,
then, a coward," he thought. Nor could he by-and-by repress a start of
terror on hearing Rinaldo speak out of the darkness. With screams for
the lamp, and cries that he was suffering slow murder, he underwent a
paroxysm in the effort to conceal his abject horror. Rinaldo sat by his
side patiently. At last, he said: "We are both of us prisoners on
equal terms now." That was quieting intelligence to Wilfrid, who asked
eagerly: "What hour is it?"

It was eleven of the forenoon. Wilfrid strove to dissociate his
recollection of clear daylight from the pressure of the hideous
featureless time surrounding him. He asked: "What week?" It was the
first week in March. Wilfrid could not keep from sobbing aloud. In the
early period of such a captivity, imagination, deprived of all other
food, conjures phantasms for the employment of the brain; but there is
still some consciousness within the torpid intellect wakeful to laugh at
them as they fly, though they have held us at their mercy. The face of
time had been imaged like the withering mask of a corpse to him. He had
felt, nevertheless, that things had gone on as we trust them to do at
the closing of our eyelids: he had preserved a mystical remote faith
in the steady running of the world above, and hugged it as his most
precious treasure. A thunder was rolled in his ears when he heard of
the flight of two months at one bound. Two big months! He would have
guessed, at farthest, two weeks. "I have been two months in one shirt?
Impossible!" he exclaimed. His serious idea (he cherished it for the
support of his reason) was, that the world above had played a mad prank
since he had been shuffled off its stage.

"It can't be March," he said. "Is there sunlight overhead?"

"It is a true Milanese March," Rinaldo replied.

"Why am I kept a prisoner?"

"I cannot say. Ther