“Necessitates it!” cried Wilfrid.  “Is this your Italian gratitude?”

The other answered:  “My friend, you risked your fortune for my brother; but this is a case that concerns our country.”

He deemed these words to be an unquestionable justification, for he said no more.  After this they ceased to converse.

Each lay down on his strip of couch-matting; rose and ate, and passed the dreadful untamed hours; nor would Wilfrid ask whether it was day or night.  We belong to time so utterly, that when we get no note of time, it wears the shrouded head of death for us already.  Rinaldo could quit the place as he pleased; he knew the hours; and Wilfrid supposed that it must be hatred that kept him from voluntarily divulging that blessed piece of knowledge.  He had to encourage a retorting spirit of hatred in order to mask his intense craving.  By an assiduous calculation of seconds and minutes, he was enabled to judge that the lamp burned a space of six hours before it required replenishing.  Barto Rizzo’s wife trimmed it regularly, but the accursed woman came at all seasons.  She brought their meals irregularly, and she would never open her lips:  she was like a guardian of the tombs.  Wilfrid abandoned his dream of the variation of night and day, and with that the sense of life deadened, as the lamp did toward the sixth hour.  Thenceforward his existence fed on the movements of his companion, the workings of whose mind he began to read with a marvellous insight.  He knew once, long in advance of the act or an indication of it, that Rinaldo was bent on prayer.  Rinaldo had slightly closed his eyelids during the perusal of his book; he had taken a pencil and traced lines on it from memory, and dotted points here and there; he had left the room, and returned to resume his study.  Then, after closing the book softly, he had taken up the mark he was accustomed to place in the last page of his reading, and tossed it away.  Wilfrid was prepared to clap hands when he should see the hated fellow drop on his knees; but when that sight verified his calculation, he huddled himself exultingly in his couch-cloth:—­it was like a confirming clamour to him that he was yet wholly alive.  He watched the anguish of the prayer, and was rewarded for the strain of his faculties by sleep.  Barto Rizzo’s rough voice awakened him.  Barto had evidently just communicated dismal tidings to Rinaldo, who left the vault with him, and was absent long enough to make Wilfrid forget his hatred in an irresistible desire to catch him by the arm and look in his face.

“Ah! you have not forsaken me,” the greeting leaped out.

“Not now,” said Rinaldo.

“Do you think of going?”

“I will speak to you presently, my friend.”

“Hound!” cried Wilfrid, and turned his face to the wall.