Until 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.  There must be some idea of making use of you.”

“Have you arms?”

“I have none.”

“You know where they’re to be had.”

“I know, but I would not take them if I could.  They, my friend, are for a better cause.”

“A thousand curses on your country!” cried Wilfrid.  “Give me air; give me freedom, I am stifled; I am eaten up with dirt; I am half dead.  Are we never to have the lamp again?”