"Caterina? They whipped her, that next morning. That's why she couldn't come before. Even now--" He stretched out his arms. The slow roll of his voice filled the chamber like the beating of an iron heart. "Oh, Christ on the Cross--" he prayed, "Oh, Christ on the Cross--You have given us a way to the air--Give us vengeance too--if only a little--a little--" He broke off. "We must rest for a while," he said more naturally. "Even with the bar cut through we will need all our strength for the stone." 4. The bar was all but cut through--the cut plastered over and concealed. Then they had to wait. They had rested longer than they had intended before starting the work, sinking down into a black, murmuring bog of sleep as soon as their heads touched the floor, and when the task was nearly done, the air beyond the window had changed, and, behind dark gauzes, yellow dawn began to stir faintly, like a bird still hidden in the egg. After that, they could sleep again for a while, but not as they had slept before. They were too tense, the bog refused to receive them, they napped in uneasy snatches like dogs before a hunt. Andrew, waking a dozen times, each time glowered up at the window and was angry to see how slowly the first pale stiletto of light broadened into a yellow sword. When the corporal brought their breakfast they were both broad awake and very restless. They tried to hold him in talk to make the minutes pass but he was surly and would only mutter in general terms against sergeants who cheated honest men out of their pay with dice that had a spell on them. "By God," he growled, "if both of you weren't such traitors, I'd change you a bottle of Augustine rum for the promise of a couple of knucklebones after you were hanged. They say a hanged man's knucklebones make wizardy dice, if he's strung up in the natural course of crime--but being traitors, yours wouldn't serve most likely--'tis just my luck--I never played jailer before except on a black fellow that stole the Governor's wig for a heathen idol in Jamaica and he was a poor pagan that didn't leave me as much as a copper ear-ring. I was born with a caul, too, but I've never had any luck from it. When I was christened parson opened the book at the wrong place and started blazing away at the Burial Service most savagely before a' could be halted and it's shadowed me ever since. I can feel the Resurrection and the Life stuck in my throat at night like a slice of apple--You're lucky to be decently hanged, you are, there's some more grievous and judgmatical death in store for me, and it rises my dinner in me to have to think of it--" So he mourned himself away, leaving them alone with a vast desert of time.