This meant days without food. At first he drank a great deal of water, being very thirsty. Then his thirst abated and his head began to feel light. After a while he became dizzy, and even in the darkness everything seemed to float about him. On the morning after his father's visit he heard a woman's step on the stairs, followed by her knock at his door. He thought it was his sister Isabella and that she had come, with her sharp tongue, to remonstrate, so he made no answer. On the day following he heard the same light step. Isabella again! But no, she had always railed against Bessie, and he was not going to give her another opportunity of doing so. Meantime, without food or drink, he was travelling fast towards the borderland of the desert realm of Insanity, with its cruelly-beautiful mirages. Lying on his sofa with eyes closed he was picturing to himself the day of Bessie's release, when he would go to Castletown to bring her away, and then the day after, when he would marry her, and then the day after that when they would leave the island for America--Bessie walking along the pier with head down, but himself with head up, as if saying, "There you are--I told you so!" The knock came again, and again he did not answer it. "No, no, Mistress Isabella! You shan't speak ill to me of the woman who cared so much for me that she went to prison for my sake." He had still travelled farther by this time. He was out in the middle-west, on one of the high plains of that free continent. He was working at his profession. He was not a great lawyer, but he could speak out of his heart, and when he defended injured women juries heard him and judges listened. He saw them coming to him from far and near--that long trail of the broken followers after the merciless army of civilisation. They were nearly always poor and could pay him nothing. But what matter about that? At home, at night, wet or cold, there was a bowl of soup, a cheerful fire and .... Bessie! On the Saturday morning he awoke from a dizzy sleep, with the sun shining into his room and the sea outside the breakwater singing softly. He was in his shirt sleeves, for he had thrown himself on the bed in his clothes; his boots were unbuttoned; his fair hair was tangled; he had not shaved for many days. Again he heard the light step on the stairs. But something in the rustle of the dress seemed to say that after all it was not his sister. He listened. There were two knocks, louder and more insistent than before; then the rattle of the brass lid of his letter-box, and then something falling on the floor. A letter! After the light footsteps had gone downstairs he crept over the carpet on tiptoe, picked up the letter and looked at it. There were two lines at the top, partly printed, and partly written-- "_Castle Rushen Prison--Number 7._"