"Ah, poor fool! There thou hast me. Thou knowst well I have no balm in my box to medicine that hurt. Yet what can't be cured, may be forgot, for a while at least. Wine would do it. Perchance tobacco may--Curse that guard! How good his pipe smells!--I would I had one." Neville had never yet failed of a benefit for lack of asking, so now he set up a tattoo with his fists on the wall. "What's wanted within there?" came gruffly from the guard. "What would you want if you'd been shut up in this cold hole for a night and a day?" "I might _want_ ortolans and pheasants and a bottle of old Madeira; but if I was a murderer, and as good as a dead man myself, I shouldn't look to get them--not in _this_ world." Neville kept his temper. It was all he had left. "Maybe not; but if you saw a fellow outside, with a pipe in his mouth and a tobacco pouch in his pocket, and another pipe bulging out at the breast of his jerkin, it's likely you'd count on his taking pity on the poor devil locked up inside, and giving him a bit smoke." The guard weakened visibly. Neville could see through the crack that he half turned and put his hand irresolutely to his pocket. Then he straightened himself more rigidly. "How do I know but you want to set the tobacco-house afire? And then off you'd be, and 'tis I must answer for you to the Governor--a just man, but hard on one that fails in his duty." "Come, then," called Neville more cheerfully, feeling his point half won; "why not come in and smoke with me? Then you can keep an eye on me and the tobacco together, and it will be a comfort to me to have speech of a fellow mortal instead of being tormented by my cursed unpleasant thoughts." Truth to tell, the guard was nearly as weary of solitude as his prisoner. This walking up and down in the dusk from one pine-tree to another was not lively work, and besides, there was a compelling magnetism in Neville's voice that had charmed stronger men than the guard, Philpotts. Slowly, and with a certain reluctance to yield characteristic of Englishmen, and quite independent of the value of the thing conceded, he drew the heavy bolt and entered. The interior of the shed, for it was scarcely more, was dismal enough in the half light. The long tobacco leaves hanging from the beams suggested mourner's weeds, and waved ominously in the wind as the door was opened. Daylight still peeped in through the chinks. By its help Neville studied the heavy outlines of the guard's figure clad in a sad colored campaign coat lined with blue and surmounted by a montero cap which shaded a pock-marked face, a typical English face, square cut, obstinate, with persistence and loyalty writ large all over it. "Pardon my not rising," said Neville, as if he were receiving a courtier. "The cold and dampness of this place have given me the rheum to such extent that each bone in my body hath its own particular pain. If I kneel my knees ache, if I sit my hips ache, if I bend my back aches."