gh the unseen
ventilator, chilled him to the bone. To keep walking was his only
resource.

A kind of drowsiness, too, occasionally came over him. It took all his
will to fight it off. To sleep, he felt, was to die, and he had made up
his mind to live.

The strangest fancies flitted through his head as he groped up and down
the stone floor of the dungeon, feeling his way along the wall to avoid
the sepulchres. Voices that had long been silent spoke words that had
long been forgotten; faces he had known in childhood grew palpable
against the dark. His whole life in detail was unrolled before him like
a panorama; the changes of a year, with its burden of love and death,
its sweets and its bitternesses, were epitomized in a single second. The
desire to sleep had left him, but the keen hunger came again.

"It must be near morning now," he mused; "perhaps the sun is just
gilding the towers of Notre Dame; or, may be, a dull, drizzling rain is
beating on Paris, sobbing on these mounds above me. Paris! it seems like
a dream. Did I ever walk in its gay boulevards in the golden air? Oh,
the delight and pain and passion of that sweet human life!"

Philip became conscious that the gloom, the silence, and the cold were
gradually conquering him. The feverish activity of his brain brought on
a reaction. He grew lethargic; he sunk down on the steps, and thought
of nothing. His hand fell by chance on one of the pieces of candle;
he grasped it and devoured it mechanically. This revived him. "How
strange," he thought, "that I am not thirsty. Is it possible that
the dampness of the walls, which I must inhale with every breath, has
supplied the need of water? Not a drop has passed my lips for two days,
and still I experience no thirst. That drowsiness, thank Heaven, has
gone. I think I was never wide awake until this hour. It would be an
anodyne like poison that could weigh down my eyelids. No doubt the dread
of sleep has something to do with this."

The minutes were like hours. Now he walked as briskly as he dared up
and down the tomb; now he rested against the door. More than once he was
tempted to throw himself upon the stone coffin that held Julie, and make
no further struggle for his life.

Only one piece of candle remained. He had eaten the third portion, not
to satisfy hunger, but from a precautionary motive he had taken it as a
man takes some disagreeable drug upon the result of which hangs safety.
The time was rapidly approac