Once a day, and once only, the door of his cell opened. By the smoky light of a torch, his gaoler pushed a pitcher of water and a machet of bread into his prison. Then the red light died and darkness and silence supervened. Yet it was not the ordinary darkness which men know. Through the haunted chambers of Tristan's mind fantastic forms began to chase each other, evil things to uncoil themselves and raise their heads. More and more drearily the burden of the days began to press upon him. What availed heroic endurance? But it was not only darkness, nor was it only despair. Nor was it only silence. It was a strange impalpable something which haunted his restless, enforced vigil; a dim inchoate nothingness, that drove him to the verge of madness. Though day draped the sky with blue and golden banners, to tell the sons of men that Night was past and they need not longer fear, for Tristan darkness was not a transient thing, but an awful negation of hope. All of this Tristan could have endured, had not the thought of Hellayne unnerved him utterly. She was safe--so he hoped--in the Convent of Santa Maria in Trastevere. But, as hour succeeded hour, his assurance began to pale. Everything had been arranged with the Abbess. But--had she indeed eluded her pursuers? The empty coffin had no doubt long been discovered. Did they believe she was dead, or did the hand who had dealt the blow in the dark, the vigilant eye that had pursued her every step, plot further mischief? He thought of Odo of Cluny. The monk was influential, but there was, at this hour, in Rome, one even more powerful, and he doubted not but that by his agency the wafer had been placed into his doublet, though the events of that fateful night from the time he had entered the Lateran, were like a black blot upon his memory. Had Odo even sought admission to his cell? Did he, too, believe him guilty? Had his ears, too, been poisoned by the monstrous lie? To him he might indeed have turned; of him he might have received assurance of Hellayne's fate; and in return he might have reassured her who was pining at the Convent of Santa Maria in Trastevere. But, was she ignorant indeed of what was happening in the seven-hilled city of Rome? Would not the rumor of the terrible outrage committed at the Lateran knock even at the silent walls of the convent? A captain of the Senator's guard caught red-handed in the perpetration of a crime too heinous for the human mind to conceive!