“What!” he shrieked. Then, in a moment, realising the practical fact of his isolation--realising all that was implied by it--he fell upon his agitation and smothered it. “My friend,” he said, “wilt thou convey a letter for me?” “That depends.” “Naturally. See, then” (he fetched out a pencil; tore a square from the white paper that lined his basket of provisions)--“I write to the citizen Vergniaud--dating my _billet_, ‘_Prison of La Force_’--these words: ‘_I am detained here on a ridiculous charge. In the name of sanity, come at once and release me--Murk_.’ I put the paper in your hands; as I will put a _louis-d’or_ when you stand before me with the answer.” The jailer’s eyes twinkled. Said he-- “I go off duty after the ‘Evening Gazette’ is issued. The citizen may depend upon me.” Ned groaned. “Well,” he said, “what can’t be cured must be endured. But, the earlier the respite, the more generous my acknowledgment.” He was locked in again; the sentry resumed his tramp; the little window under the ceiling dusked like a drowsing eyelid. Presently, drugged by utter weariness of brain and nerve, he dozed on one of the rickety chairs, and woke to the glare of a candle, and the presence of his friendly jailer in the room. “Behold my despatch, citizen!” He seized the scrap of paper (that bearing his own message), and read, scribbled on the back of it, “I fly to the succour of my dear friend the very moment I may quit myself of a little present business of urgency.” “Here are thy vails,” said Ned, in a tone of glad relief; “and leave me the candle, my friend. I shall not need it long.” * * * * * * * * Up and down--up and down. The shape of the window under the ceiling became intimate to the desolate character of the room, rather than to that segment of the free sky without which it had once appropriated to itself. It was like a regard turned inwards--an eye glazing in the trance of self-inquisition; and as such it was illustrative of the vision of the tormented soul it imprisoned from light. Up and down. The candle had long guttered and fallen upon itself; his only ray of comfort from the outer world came in a stretched thread of lamp-shine under the door. Dark night had crept upon him, with the screak and thunder of slamming oak and iron, and an increased emotion, rather than a sense, of muffled deep confinement; and still the respite delayed, and must now delay, he was sick to think, until the morrow. For, at last the voices of introspection, that all day he had striven, yet feared, to interpret, were become soul-audible sounds in the tenseness of black silence; and at last his brain was clearing, throwing truth, like a precipitate, into his heart.