He took his sordid meals, his cocoa, his bread, his gruel, not because he had ever any appetite for them, but because without them he should lose his strength.  He must husband that for the long-expected hour when he might need it; when the moment had arrived to strike the blow for which his hand was clenched ten times a day.  His hate grew every hour, and, like a petrifying spring, fell drop by drop about his heart, and made it stone.  In the mean time, a fiend in torment could alone imagine what he suffered.  He spoke to no one but his warders and the chaplain; for now he was a convict, there was no communication with his fellows; only once a day for an hour and a half he took his monotonous exercise in the high-walled prison-yard.  Tramp, tramp, tramp, each half a dozen paces behind the other, with an officer on the watch to see that the limit was preserved.

“Keep your distance, you there, unless you want to be reported.”

Richard did not want that; but at times his temper was like a devil unchained, and it got the better of him, and even of his treasured purpose; he sometimes returned a sharp answer.  This weakness was almost the only feeling within him that reminded him that he was human.  He was put on bread and water within the first fortnight; then cursed his folly for thus postponing the one object of his life, and amended.  His case was quoted to the visiting justices as an exemplification of the efficacy of cutting short a prisoner’s supplies.

While exercising one day he recognized Balfour, who happened to be on the opposite side of the ever-moving circle:  the old jail-bird, without glancing toward him, threw his open hands out twice.  By this he conveyed to him that his own sentence was also twenty years.  During the nine months that Richard remained at Cross Key, this was all that happened to him which could be called an incident.  At the end of three months his mother essayed to visit him, but he would not see her.  She had been ill, it seemed, ever since that dreadful day of the trial, and was only just convalescent; she had had lodgings in the town, within a hundred yards of him, ever since:  it was something, poor soul, to know that she was near him, however inexorably separated.  “It would please him,” she wrote, “to learn that, through Mr. Whymper’s intercession, Carew had continued her pension.  She had money enough, therefore, and to spare, but intended to go on with her business of lodging-house keeping in a new quarter of London, and under another name (that of Basil), that she might save, and her Richard find himself a rich man when he regained his liberty.  In fifteen years—­she had discovered that his time could be remitted to that extent—­there would be quite a little fortune for him.  In the mean time, she thought of him night and day.”  But there was something else in the letter.  “She confessed that in her agony at his dreadful doom, she had written to his prosecutor to adjure him to appeal for mercy to the crown, and he had refused to do so.”  This news had driven Richard almost to frenzy.  He had written her such a letter as the prison authorities had refused to send, and now he would not see her.