hours alone on
that prison bed with only his wasted life and his wrong-doings and his
wrongs to think of, but when I visited him he had always a smile and a
pleasant word with which to greet me,--there was never a complaint.
Sometimes he would talk of himself and of his early life when he and I
had been at college together, and he would ask about his old friends and
the outside world, and all in the manner of a man who had done with it,
but he seldom referred to the charge against him or to the death of
White. Once he asked me about Littell and Miles and when I assured him
of their continued interest in his behalf he shook his head and bade me
tell them to think no more of it--"they have been very kind," he
said--and I knew he meant he would not live for a second trial, and I
could not contradict him.

Sometimes during these days I would doubt, too, if it were worth
while--this task I had set myself--of hunting down the murderer, for it
could no longer avail to help Winters and must only bring more trouble
in its trail. The authorities would be content to let it pass with the
death of Winters into the long category of undetermined crimes and why
should not I also? and I would be tempted to call Miles from his work,
but always something--a vague fear I wanted quieted, held me back. I
would recall many things that had happened and that had made little
impression on me at the time, but which seemed now in the hours of my
solitude and depression to be fraught with some strange significance.
That speech of Littell's to the jury in which he had described the
murderer as a friend of White's, and his strange words of admonition to
me at our dinner, and the refusal of Miles to let me longer share in his
work, and the presence of the detective, lurking near our club when my
friends took their leave, what did it all mean? Was there something in
the background which I did not know and which they did not wish me to
learn? I feared for that which I knew not and which was coming with a
fear that gripped my heart, yet I would not lift a hand to stay it, but
waited for it with passive submission.

Such thoughts, such feelings as these possessed me as I sat alone in my
office this gloomy afternoon waiting for Miles. After a silence that
seemed ages he had at last sought me and I knew he had succeeded in his
task and was coming to tell me of it. As the hour drew near for his
arrival my vague fears grew stronger and would not be shaken o