It was not for him to cringe and sue to a prisoner to come out of that foul hole, och! no; and the Bishop's sumner inflated his choking chest and went back for another pipe. But half an hour later the night had closed in, and old Gorry, with a lantern in his hand, was at the door of Dan's prison again. "To tell the truth, sir," he muttered, "I can't get lave for a wink of sleep up yonder, and if you don't come up to the fire I wouldn't trust but I'll be forced to stay down here in the cold myself." Before Dan could make answer there came a loud knocking from overhead. In another moment the key of the door had turned in its lock from without, and Gorry's uncertain footfall was retreating on the steps. When Dan had first been left alone in his dark cell he had cast himself down on the broad slab cut from the rock, which was his only seat and bed. His suspense was over; the weight of uncertainty was lifted from his brain; and he tried to tell himself that he had done well. He thought of Ewan now with other feelings than before--of his uprightness, his tenderness, his brotherly affection, his frequent intercession, and no less frequent self-sacrifice. Then he thought of his own headlong folly, his blank insensitiveness, his cold ingratitude, and, last of all, of his blundering passion and mad wrath. All else on both sides was blotted from his memory in that hour of dark searching. Alone with his crime--tortured no more by blind hopes of escaping its penalty, or dread misgivings as to the measure of his guilt--his heart went out to the true friend whose life he had taken with a great dumb yearning and a bitter remorse. No cruel voice whispered now in palliation of his offense that it had not been murder, but the accident of self-defense. He had proposed the fight that ended with Ewan's death, and, when Ewan would have abandoned it, he, on his part, would hear of no truce. Murder it was; and, bad as murder is at the best, this murder had been, of all murders, most base and foul. Yes, he had done well. Here alone could he know one hour of respite from terrible thoughts. This dark vault was his only resting-place until he came to lie in the last resting-place of all. There could be no going back. Life was forever closed against him. He had spilled the blood of the man who had loved him with more than a brother's love, and to whom his own soul had been grappled with hooks of steel. It was enough, and the sick certainty of the doom before him was easiest to bear. It was with thoughts like these that Dan had spent his first hours in prison, and when old Gorry had interrupted them time after time with poor little troubles about the freezing cold of the pestilential place he hardly saw through the old man's simulation into the tender bit of human nature that lay behind it.