He strutted along, pluming himself on my praise. All that I have stated--the truth about this smiling, damned Gehenna--I drew from him then or thereafter. I cannot recall it now without a shudder like death’s. Once that morning we came, in a retired corner, upon the prettiest, greenest graveyard--the sweetest God’s-acre, God pity it! in all the sad world. It was studded with quiet flowers, screened with fragrant shrubs, thick with graves, _each a nameless grassy barrow_. What depth of tragedy in it all! I cannot, I vow, dwell any longer on the picture, but must cover the details of it at a gallop. I was nine weeks, before I found release, in this appalling hell--a time the most stupendous of my life. I will acquit the Lady Sophia of intending the worst; I cannot acquit her of implying it. Whether from jealousy, or a true conviction as to the unpardonable nature of my recreancy, she failed, at least, to assure the instruments of her cruelty that my death-sentence was not intimated in the bond. It is possible she may have been totally ignorant of the real character of the place to which she condemned me. She is none the less responsible for the conclusions the Rhadamanthus of that inferno elected to draw from her dubiety. Anyhow, I am convinced that my destruction was designed, before I had been there many days. In the meantime--O, my Alcide, pity thy Diane! What had she done to merit this fate, the most awful that could befall a brilliant sanity? Very, very soon that early buoyancy was like nothing but the memory of a bright star, that had exploded and scattered as soon as realised. A sickness, a deadly apprehension, took its place; a sense of some creeping, circumventing terror, which hemmed me in, stealthy and pitiless, concentrating my thoughts on a single point in this cursed paradise. I was inoculated with the disease of the morbid intellects about me. My reason suffered deliberate contamination by the remorseless ghoul my keeper. No fewer than three times during my short sojourn in his inferno did the corpse of a self-destroyer witness to the success of his methods. They went to swell the bloody tally of shrouds under the grass in the little graveyard; and, thinking of them there, their awful waiting testimony, I would look up to find the evil eye of their murderer fixed upon me in covert, lustful speculation.