I was getting a little feverish, as was only natural. I found it necessary to use some effort to brace myself up for the final ordeal. Thoughts of Sibella haunted me, and played upon my memory like the love motive on the lover’s brain in Berlioz’s Scarlet Symphony. She was the allure beckoning my thoughts back to life, and it was a strange confirmation of what I had always felt—viz., that she was my strongest human magnet. I had not heard from her since the day of my arrest, but two days before the end I received a letter. It gave me infinite pleasure, and I knew it was the one thing I had been waiting for. She did not know, she wrote, how she had managed in her agony to conceal the truth from Lionel, but so far he had suspected nothing; indeed, he was working night and day for me. I became quite sentimental over this letter. My thoughts wandered back to the schoolroom in the Hallwards’ house on Clapham Common. I saw Sibella as a little school-girl with a host of boy admirers. I remembered her as she was that afternoon we came home from football and all had tea together. I remembered the kisses, beautiful and perfumed as roses, which we had exchanged as children, and I remembered the burning kiss, unexpected by both of us, exchanged that Sunday evening when Grahame left us alone. These things returned to me with the dull pain of melodies, associated with wild moments of joy, heard again in moments of desolation, phantoms of music wailing past in the haunted air. Apart from the ineradicable desire to live, which is the chief vice of human beings, I was not very anxious for my friends to obtain a reprieve. In default of an absolute pardon, my reason taught me that it would be better for them to fail. I did not relish the idea of wearing out my life in chains. Thus, when the eve of the fatal day arrived, I experienced a certain relief. I retired to rest with an indifference which I saw impressed the only audience I had left. I slept peacefully for several hours, but towards morning I experienced a curious sensation of semi-giddiness, as if I were being rocked in mid-air. The sensation grew more and more rapid, till, suddenly, it seemed as if I were hurtling through space at a terrific speed, as if worlds, stars, and atmosphere were revolving round me at a rate indescribable to human intelligence. It was as if I were in the engine-room of the universe, and as if the ceaseless terror of its secrets whirled me hither and thither, like a grain of sand. I was in the unlimited, unable to grasp time or space. Then, by degrees, there came a calm; I lay still: and, almost unconscious of having passed out of the sleeping state, I was awake, with my eyes fixed on the Governor.