on
the hearth. The gloom of the close of a rainy winter's day was over
everything and my thoughts and heart seemed full of the vague shadows
that haunted the room. I was awaiting the coming of Miles, who that
morning had sent me word that he had something to report. During the
past fortnight he had been persistently engaged in working on his new
theory of the case, but with what results I did not know, for he had
told me nothing.

I also had at first made an effort to accomplish something along the
same lines, for I had found inaction almost unbearable, but it proved
to no purpose. The time had passed for analyses of conditions; what was
now needed was expert detective work, and this I could not do, and so I
had to give it up and in despair resign myself to idly waiting on Miles.

I might have sought the companionship of Van Bult and Davis, for they
were about as usual, doing the same old things in the same old way, but
I was not disposed to engage in their amusements and I doubt much if
they were anxious for the society of a man in a condition of mind such
as mine. From Littell I had only heard once since his departure and that
letter recently received from Florida was but to tell me that he was
about starting for home. He was coming back, he wrote, to again conduct
the defence of Winters; if it were so, it would prove but a wasted
errand, I feared, for there seemed little likelihood of Winters needing
our services again. He was very ill, and no longer confined in a cell,
but in the hospital ward of the prison to which he had been removed by
the physician's orders after the trial. His strength was gone, and it
did not need the professional eye to see that he was dying.

As soon as I had learned of his condition I had gone to him, not once
but almost daily, and each time I had spent long hours at his bedside.
No one was ever with him but his jailors and nurses; they were
attentive, considerate, but to them he was only a criminal whom they had
in charge and they performed their duties and no more. I was his only
visitor, his only friend; even the hysterical women whose habit it is to
shower their attentions and tears on hardened criminals found nothing
heroic enough by the silent bedside of this dying man to call for their
ministrations. His case, now become but a nine day's wonder, forgotten
or neglected by the press and public, furnished no longer a gallery to
be played to. Poor fellow! he must have spent many weary