and rejected by my better
reason. I sought--and I knew it in my heart--solution of the puzzle,
because it was a puzzle with an atmosphere that vitiated my moral fibre.
Now, suddenly, I knew I must act, or, by forcing self-control, imperil
my mind's stability.

All strung to a sort of exaltation, I rose noiselessly and dressed myself
with rapid, nervous hands. My every faculty was focussed upon a
solitary point. Without and around there was nothing but shadow and
uncertainty. I seemed conscious only of a shaft of light, as it were,
traversing the darkness and globing itself in a steady disc of radiance
on a lonely door.

Slipping out into the great echoing vault of the prison in stockinged
feet, I sped with no hesitation of purpose in the direction of the
corridor that was my goal. Surely some resolute Providence guided and
encompassed me, for no meeting with the night patrol occurred at any
point to embarrass or deter me. Like a ghost myself, I flitted along
the stone flags of the passages, hardly waking a murmur from them in my
progress.

Without, I knew, a wild and stormy wind thundered on the walls of the
prison. Within, where the very atmosphere was self-contained, a cold and
solemn peace held like an irrevocable judgment.

I found myself as if in a dream before the sealed door that had for days
harassed my waking thoughts. Dim light from a distant gas jet made a
patch of yellow upon one of its panels; the rest was buttressed with
shadow.

A sense of fear and constriction was upon me as I drew softly from my
pocket a screwdriver I had brought with me. It never occurred to me, I
swear, that the quest was no business of mine, and that even now I could
withdraw from it, and no one be the wiser. But I was afraid--I was
afraid. And there was not even the negative comfort of knowing that the
neighbouring cell was tenanted. It gaped like a ghostly garret next
door to a deserted house.

What reason had I to be there at all, or, being there, to fear? I can no
more explain than tell how it was that I, an impartial follower of my
vocation, had allowed myself to be tricked by that in the nerves I had
made it my interest to study and combat in others.

My hand that held the tool was cold and wet. The stiff little shriek of
the first screw, as it turned at first uneasily in its socket, sent a
jarring thrill through me. But I persevered, and it came out readily
by-and-by, as did the four or five others that held the trap