Now the meeting with the living James Campbell had cured him of that delusion also, and left him to one more natural but not the less painful. When next he awoke from temporary oblivion his brain was clearer and his memory more accurate than either had yet been since his illness; still, both were somewhat clouded, so that they mixed up time and space, and dreams and realities in weird phantasmagoria. For instance, he remembered every detail of the two murders he thought he had committed, but not an item of the meeting with his two intended victims living to accuse him, not of murder, but of attempted murder. And without reflecting, or being now able to reflect, that he could not possibly be hung in England for murders committed in America, he now thought that he was in the condemned cell of an English prison, waiting for speedy execution; that the huge giant who loomed through the shadows of the prison was his death watch, and that James Campbell had come to him in his clerical capacity to prepare him for death. “But I will not allow him to worm any confession out of me. I have been convicted on the frailest circumstantial evidence, and they dare not hang me at the last. I will have nothing to do with the parson. I won’t even know him.” This was the most coherent thought that Gentleman Geff had formed since he sank into stupor in the drawing-room of Haymore Hall. But the instinct of self-preservation is a wonderful stimulant to the brain. So when James Campbell came next to him he turned his face to the wall and would not notice him. When Longman came and gave him food and asked how he felt he answered: “I want to see my lawyer. Send him here.” Longman, who had been directed to humor all his whims, replied: “Very well, sir. He shall be summoned immediately.” “And don’t let that parson come near me again. I hate parsons. And if he thinks he is going to nag me into confessing crimes I never even dreamed of committing he must be a much bigger fool than ever I took him to be. Send my lawyer to me, do you hear?” “All right, sir.” “Well, then, why the devil don’t you do it? You needn’t keep such an infernal sharp lookout on me. I am not going to commit suicide, I tell you.” Longman laughed and left the room. Gentleman Geff turned with his face to the wall and tried to remember the details of his supposed trial—what the lawyers had said, what “his honor” said, how he, the prisoner at the bar, had behaved; and then, failing to remember anything of what had never occurred, his diseased brain took to imagining a whole drama, in which he formed the central figure. The doctor came in the same morning, felt his pulse and asked him how he had slept. “None the better for you and your quackeries,” was the reply. “And if I am supposed to be sick enough to have a physician, why the devil am I not sent to a hospital, and not kept in this wretched hole?” he added, still believing himself to be in the condemned cell of the Chuxton jail.