“What on earth is the matter with me?” he reflected. For the moment a re-dawn of sanity glowed within him; his pulses slowed. “It is too utterly ridiculous!” he said aloud. He rose to his feet, and, feeling by the wall, went up and down, up and down, hoping to tire himself in a normal way. But gradually he seemed to become conscious, every time he approached the door, of some evil invisible presence lurking outside. The vast emptiness of the house above occurred to him with a horror even greater than his cell inspired. “They are trooping down,” he thought awfully, “to listen at my door.” Who the ‘they’ were only his excited imagination might say. Little by little, he contracted his area, until he was standing once more motionless by the heap of sacking. “Solitary confinement in a dark cell is an unutterable wickedness--an unutterable wickedness,” he kept repeating to himself. Then, in a spasm of horror, he turned, and clawed blindly at the wall, like a trapped animal. He dared not go near the door again, or he would have concentrated all his strength on one frenzied effort to burst it open. But he had come to dread horribly the thought of evoking an uproar in that blind silence. As long as he was quiet _they_ might keep outside. Presently, his legs seeming to give under him, he sank down again upon his rough couch. An hour went by in such mental suffering as he had never before experienced or conceived. And then, suddenly, with a ghastly groan, he pulled himself together and sat up. “I can stand no more,” he whispered, and, reaching for the bottle, knocked its head off against the wall. A gush of liquid came over his hand, a stinging fragrance to his nostrils--brandy! “Thank God!” he ejaculated fervently, and without hesitation put his mouth to the shattered edge, indifferent to consequences, and gulping once or twice, replaced the bottle on the stones. The potent stuff poured into his veins; its fumes rose to his brain. Like any overtaken sot, he toppled prone, and lapsed into quick insensibility. A cry in his brain, a pertinacious worry of light in his eyes, awoke him, and he raised his head. There were people in the cellar--his secretary, Miss Halifax, a curious stranger, a police constable holding a dark-lantern. The lady, from whom the pity-stricken exclamation seemed to have come, stood, one hand poised at her lips, a little apart. The secretary bent over him. “It’s all right, sir,” he said. “He’s caught, thank God!” Gilead, with assistance, staggered to his feet. “What--where!” he exclaimed wildly--“Mr Justice Starkey?” “Ah!” said the secretary; “you know his name, then?” “He told me plain enough,” said Gilead faintly--“and his purpose; but that was after he’d locked me in. How did you know? how did you find me?”