As soon as I had learned of his condition I had gone to him, not once but almost daily, and each time I had spent long hours at his bedside. No one was ever with him but his jailors and nurses; they were attentive, considerate, but to them he was only a criminal whom they had in charge and they performed their duties and no more. I was his only visitor, his only friend; even the hysterical women whose habit it is to shower their attentions and tears on hardened criminals found nothing heroic enough by the silent bedside of this dying man to call for their ministrations. His case, now become but a nine day's wonder, forgotten or neglected by the press and public, furnished no longer a gallery to be played to. Poor fellow! he must have spent many weary hours alone on that prison bed with only his wasted life and his wrong-doings and his wrongs to think of, but when I visited him he had always a smile and a pleasant word with which to greet me,--there was never a complaint. Sometimes he would talk of himself and of his early life when he and I had been at college together, and he would ask about his old friends and the outside world, and all in the manner of a man who had done with it, but he seldom referred to the charge against him or to the death of White. Once he asked me about Littell and Miles and when I assured him of their continued interest in his behalf he shook his head and bade me tell them to think no more of it--"they have been very kind," he said--and I knew he meant he would not live for a second trial, and I could not contradict him. Sometimes during these days I would doubt, too, if it were worth while--this task I had set myself--of hunting down the murderer, for it could no longer avail to help Winters and must only bring more trouble in its trail. The authorities would be content to let it pass with the death of Winters into the long category of undetermined crimes and why should not I also? and I would be tempted to call Miles from his work, but always something--a vague fear I wanted quieted, held me back. I would recall many things that had happened and that had made little impression on me at the time, but which seemed now in the hours of my solitude and depression to be fraught with some strange significance. That speech of Littell's to the jury in which he had described the murderer as a friend of White's, and his strange words of admonition to me at our dinner, and the refusal of Miles to let me longer share in his work, and the presence of the detective, lurking near our club when my friends took their leave, what did it all mean? Was there something in the background which I did not know and which they did not wish me to learn? I feared for that which I knew not and which was coming with a fear that gripped my heart, yet I would not lift a hand to stay it, but waited for it with passive submission.