All strung to a sort of exaltation, I rose noiselessly and dressed myself with rapid, nervous hands.  My every faculty was focussed upon a solitary point.  Without and around there was nothing but shadow and uncertainty.  I seemed conscious only of a shaft of light, as it were, traversing the darkness and globing itself in a steady disc of radiance on a lonely door.

Slipping out into the great echoing vault of the prison in stockinged feet, I sped with no hesitation of purpose in the direction of the corridor that was my goal.  Surely some resolute Providence guided and encompassed me, for no meeting with the night patrol occurred at any point to embarrass or deter me.  Like a ghost myself, I flitted along the stone flags of the passages, hardly waking a murmur from them in my progress.

Without, I knew, a wild and stormy wind thundered on the walls of the prison.  Within, where the very atmosphere was self-contained, a cold and solemn peace held like an irrevocable judgment.

I found myself as if in a dream before the sealed door that had for days harassed my waking thoughts.  Dim light from a distant gas jet made a patch of yellow upon one of its panels; the rest was buttressed with shadow.

A sense of fear and constriction was upon me as I drew softly from my pocket a screwdriver I had brought with me.  It never occurred to me, I swear, that the quest was no business of mine, and that even now I could withdraw from it, and no one be the wiser.  But I was afraid—­I was afraid.  And there was not even the negative comfort of knowing that the neighbouring cell was tenanted.  It gaped like a ghostly garret next door to a deserted house.

What reason had I to be there at all, or, being there, to fear?  I can no more explain than tell how it was that I, an impartial follower of my vocation, had allowed myself to be tricked by that in the nerves I had made it my interest to study and combat in others.

My hand that held the tool was cold and wet.  The stiff little shriek of the first screw, as it turned at first uneasily in its socket, sent a jarring thrill through me.  But I persevered, and it came out readily by-and-by, as did the four or five others that held the trap secure.

Then I paused a moment; and, I confess, the quick pant of fear seemed to come grey from my lips.  There were sounds about me—­the deep breathing of imprisoned men; and I envied the sleepers their hard-wrung repose.

At last, in one access of determination, I put out my hand, and sliding back the bolt, hurriedly flung open the trap.  An acrid whiff of dust assailed my nostrils as I stepped back a pace and stood expectant of anything—­or nothing.  What did I wish, or dread, or foresee?  The complete absurdity of my behaviour was revealed to me in a moment.  I could shake off the incubus here and now, and be a sane man again.

I giggled, with an actual ring of self-contempt in my voice, as I made a forward movement to close the aperture.  I advanced my face to it, and inhaled the sluggish air that stole forth, and—­God in heaven!