“Yes,” said the Commandant, reading Dorothea’s thought, “a large family to be responsible for!  How many would you guess, now?”

“A thousand, at least,” she murmured.

“Six thousand!  Each of those blocks yonder will accommodate fifteen hundred men.  And then there is the hospital—­usually pretty full at this season, I regret to say.  Come, I won’t detain you; but really in passing you must have a look at one of our dormitories.”

He threw open a door, and she gazed in upon a long-drawn avenue of iron pillars slung with double tiers of hammocks.  The place seemed clean enough:  at the far end of the vista a fatigue gang of prisoners was busy with pails and brushes; but either it had not been thoroughly ventilated, or the dense numbers packed in it for so many hours a day had given the building an atmosphere of its own, warm and unpleasant, if not precisely foetid, after the pure, stinging air of the moorland.

“We can sleep seven hundred here,” said the Commandant; “and another dormitory of the same size runs overhead.  The top story they use as a promenade and for indoor recreation.”  He pointed to a number of grilles set in the wall at the back, at equal distances.  “For air,” he explained, “and also for keeping watch on messieurs.  Yes, we find that necessary.  Behind each is a small chamber, hollowed most scientifically, quite a little temple of acoustics.  If Miss Westcote, now, would care to step into one and listen, while I stand below with the Major and converse in ordinary tones—­”

“No, no,” Dorothea declined, hurriedly, and with a shiver.

It hurt her to think of Raoul herded among seven hundred miserables in this endless barrack, his every movement overlooked, his smallest speech overheard, by an eaves-dropping sentry.

“I think, Endymion chimed in, my sister feels her long journey, and would be glad to get our business over.”

“Ah, to be sure—­a thousand pardons!”

The Commandant shut the door and piloted them across to the hospital block.  Here on the threshold the same warm, acrid atmosphere assailed Dorothea’s nostrils, and almost choked her breathing.  Their guide led the way up a flight of stone steps to the first floor, and down a whitewashed corridor, lit along one side with narrow barred casements.  A little more than half-way down the corridor the blank wall facing these casements was pierced by a low arched passage.  Into this burrow the Commandant dived; and, standing outside, they heard a key turned in a lock.  He reappeared and beckoned to them.

“From the gallery here,” he whispered, “you look right down into the Convalescent Ward.”

Through the iron bars of the gallery Dorothea caught a glimpse of a long bare room, with twenty or thirty dejected figures in suits and caps of greyish-blue flannel, huddled about a stove.  Some were playing at cards, others at dominoes.  The murmur of their voices ascended and hummed in the little passage.