Sims nodded. "The best way," he said sadly, "the lethal chamber would be better still."
There was a momentary silence between the two men. The prison doctor felt instinctively that his distinguished visitor shrank from the ordeal before him and was bracing himself to go through with it. He was unwilling to interrupt such a famous member of his profession. It was an event to meet him, a thing which he would always remember.
Suddenly Sims rose from his chair. "Now, then," he said with a rather wan smile, "take me to the poor fellow."
Dr. Marriott opened the door and made a sign to the waiting warder.
Together the three men went to the end of the passage.
Another door was unlocked and they found themselves in a low stone hall, with a roof of heavily barred ground glass.
There was a door on each side of the place.
"That's the execution room," said Dr. Marriott in a whisper, pointing to one of the doors. "The other's the condemned cell. It's only about ten steps from one to the other. The convict, of course, never knows that. But from the time he leaves his cell to the moment of death is rarely more than forty-five seconds."
The voice of the prison doctor, though very low in key, was not subdued by any note of awe. The machinery of Death had no terrors for him. He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, with an unconscious note of the showman. The curator of a museum might have shown his treasures thus to an intelligent observer. For a second of time—so strange are the operations of the memory cells—another and far distant scene grew vivid in the mind of Morton Sims.
Once more he was paying his first visit to Rome, and had been driven from his hotel upon the Pincio to the nine o'clock Mass at St. Peter's. A suave guide had accompanied him, and among the curious crowd that thronged the rails, had told in a complacent whisper of this or that Monsignore who said or served the Mass.