om that time
onwards.... He spoke very little English but he was there more to
sympathize than to preach--

"Ce n'est pas, chere Mamselle que je suis venu le troubler sur les
questions de religion. J'ai voulu le rassurer--et vous aussi--que
j'ai deja mis en train tous les precedes possibles, et que je
connais, pour obtenir sa grace.... But," he went on, "I have spoken
to the prison doctor and begged him meantime to give the poor young
man an injection or a dose of something to make him sleep a little
while..."

Then he withdrew.

The daylight turned pink and faded to grey whilst Vivie sat by the
bed holding the left hand of the sleeping man. Exhausted with
emotion, she dropped off to sleep herself, slid off the chair on to
the parquet, laid her head on the angle of his pillow and slept
likewise....

The electric light suddenly shone out from a globe in the angle of
the wall which served two cells. She awoke; Bertie awoke. He was
still happy in some opiate dream and his eyes in his haggard face
looked at her with a sleepy, happy affection. Loth to awaken him to
reality she kissed him on the cheek and withdrew from the cell--for
the Directeur, out of delicacy, had withdrawn and left the door
ajar. She rejoined him in the corridor and he led her to her own
quarters for the night; where, worn out with sorrow and fatigue, she
undressed and slept dreamlessly.

But the hour of the awakening on that wintry Sunday morning! It was
snowing intermittently and the sky, seen from the high window, was
lead-coloured. Owing to the scarcity of fuel, the cell was unwarmed.
She dressed hurriedly, feeling still untidy and dishevelled when she
had finished. Her breakfast, and with it a little packet of white
powder from the prison doctor, to be taken with the breakfast. She
swallowed it. If it were poison sent by the German Government, what
matter? But it was in reality some drug which took the edge off
sorrow.

Bertie had evidently been given a similar dose. They spent the
morning and the afternoon of that Sunday together, almost happily.
With intervals of dreamy silence, they talked of old times. Neither
would have been surprised had the cell walls dissolved as in a
transformation scene and they had been able to step out into the
Fountain Court of the Temple or into the cheerful traffic of
Chancery Lane.

When however she returned to his cell after her evening meal, his
mood had changed; the effect of the drug had passed. He ha