was of a very
inconvenient shape, having a round blunt point, and being sharp only at a
lower part of the blade; and when the keeper came up with his supper he
asked him to bring him another kind. The man looked at him with a queer
expression.

"What is the matter?" asked Anthony; "cannot you oblige me?"

The man shook his head.

"They are the knives that are always given to prisoners under warrant for
torture."

Anthony did not understand him, and looked at him, puzzled.

"For fear they should do themselves an injury," added the gaoler.

Then the same shudder ran over his body again.

"You mean--you mean...." he began. The gaoler nodded, still looking at
him oddly, and went out; and Anthony sat, with his supper untasted,
staring before him.

* * * *

By a kind of violent reaction he had a long happy dream that night. The
fierce emotions of that day had swept over his imagination and scoured it
as with fire, and now the underlying peace rose up and flooded it with
sweetness.

He thought he was in the north again, high up on a moor, walking with one
who was quite familiar to him, but whose person he could not remember
when he woke; he did not even know whether it was man or woman. It was a
perfect autumn day, he thought, like one of those he had spent there last
year; the heather and the gorse were in flower, and the air was redolent
from their blossoms; he commented on this to the person at his side, who
told him it was always so there. Mile after mile the moor rose and
dipped, and, although Skiddaw was on his right, purple and grey, yet to
his left there was a long curved horizon of sparkling blue sea. It was a
cloudless day overhead, and the air seemed kindling and fresh round him
as it blew across the stretches of heather from the western sea. He
himself felt full of an extraordinary vitality, and the mere movement of
his limbs gave him joy as he went swiftly and easily forward over the
heather. There was the sound of the wind in his ears, and again and again
there came the gush of water from somewhere out of sight--as he had heard
it in the church by Skiddaw. There was no house or building of any kind
within sight, and he felt a great relief in these miles of heath and the
sense of holiday that they gave him. But all the joy round him and in his
heart found their point for him in the person that went with him; this
presence was their centre, as a diamond in