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.

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,