He was led away. The babble boiled over and simmered down. In a very few moments a tense quiet had succeeded the uproar. This--due partly to the reaction from excitement, partly to the fact that jailers were loitering at hand--wrought in me presently a mood of overbearing depression. I durst give no rein to my hopes or to my apprehensions, lest, getting the bit between their teeth, they should fairly run away with my reason. The prospect of another four hours of this mindless inaction--hours of which every second seemed to be marked off by the tick of a nerve--was a deplorable one, indeed. I tramped ceaselessly to and fro in my cage, humming to myself and assuming the habit of a philosophy that fitted me about as well as Danton’s breeches would have done. I grimaced to my own reflections like a coquette to her mirror. I suffered from my affectation of self-containment as severely as though I were a tight-laced _femme à la mode_ weeping to hear a tale of pity. The convent clock, moving somewhere with a thunderous click as if it were the very _doyen_ of death-watches, chimed the dusk upon me in reluctant quarters. Ghostly emanations seemed to rise from the stones of my cell, sorrowful shapes of the lost and the hopeless to lean sobbing in its corners. Sometimes I could have fancied I heard a thin scratching on the walls about me, as if the returned spectres of despair were blindly tracing with a finger the characters they had themselves engraved thereon; sometimes, as I wheeled to view of the dull square of the window, a formless shadow, set against it, would appear to drop hurriedly and fold upon itself like a bat. By the time, at last, that, despite my resolves, I was worked up to a state of agitation quite pitiful, some little relief of distraction was afforded me by the entrance into my cell of a stranger turnkey, with some coarse food on a plate in his one hand, and, in the other, a great can of water, from which he replenished my pitcher. During the half minute he was with me a shag beast of a dog kept guard at the door. “Fall to, then,” growled the man; “if thou hast the stomach for anything less dainty than fat pullets and butter.” In effect, I had none for anything; yet I thought it the sensible policy to take up the plate, when the fellow was withdrawn, and munch away the drawling minutes lest I should spend them in eating out my heart. Other than this rascal no soul came near me. I had had, it seemed, my full warning--my complete instructions. Yet, lacking reassurance during this long trial of suspense, I came to feel as if all affecting my escape must be a chimera--a fancy bred of the delirium that precedes death.