All these dark trials and temptations tortured Lyon Berners in those sleepless, awful nights he spent alone in his desolate home.
But in the morning, when he would go and visit Sybil in the prison, he not only exerted all his mental powers of self-control, but he called in the aid of powerful sedative drugs to produce the calmness of manner with which he wished to meet his wife.
Meanwhile, as the days passed, Sybil sank deeper and deeper into apathy.
Her hallucination was now complete. She imagined that, in company with her husband and their friends, she had been at church one Sabbath afternoon, when a tremendous storm of thunder, lightning, rain, and wind came up, and that they had all been obliged to take refuge in a country house for the night, and that she herself had been taken ill from the exposure, and had to remain there until she could get well enough to go home. As the days passed and the hallucination grew, she lost all count of time, and always thought that she had arrived "last Sunday," and was going home "to-morrow!"
Miss Pendleton was permitted to remain with her, and Mr. Berners was allowed to visit her every day.
So some weeks had passed, when one day a terrible event occurred.
It was early in the morning: the prison doors were just opened for the admission of visitors, and Lyon Berners had just entered the lower hall, on his way to the warden's office, to get that old man to conduct him to Sybil's cell, when he was overtaken and accosted by the sheriff:
"On your way to your wife, Mr. Berners? That is well. She will need you at this hour," said Mr. Fortescue, after the usual morning greeting.
"What is the matter?" inquired Lyon Berners hurriedly, and in great alarm.
"For Heaven's sake, compose yourself now! You will need all your self-possession, for her sake, as well as for your own. Come into the warden's office with me. He also must go with us to her cell."