"Requiescat," Julia Daly said reverently. "But I should have liked to have known that his dear wife's prayers in Heaven had saved him here."
Morton Sims did not answer and there was a silence between them for a minute or two.
The doctor was remembering a dreadful scene in the North London Prison.
. . . "If Gilbert Lothian still lived he must look like that awful figure in the condemned cell had looked—like his insane half-brother, the cunning murderer—" Morton Sims shuddered and his eyes became fixed in thought.
He had told no living soul of what he had learned that night. He never would tell any one. But it all came back to him with extreme vividness as he gazed into the fire.
Some memory-cell in his brain, long dormant and inactive, was now secreting thought with great rapidity, and, with these dark memories—it was as though some curtain had suddenly been withdrawn from a window unveiling the sombre picture of a storm—something new and more horrible still started into his mind. It passed through and vanished in a flash. His will-power beat it down and strangled it almost ere it was born.
But it left his face pale and his throat rather dry.
It was now twenty minutes to three, as the square marble clock upon the mantel showed, and immediately, before Julia Daly and Morton Sims spoke again, two people came into the room.
Both were clergymen.
First came Bishop Moultrie. He was a large corpulent man with a big red face. Heavy eyebrows of black shaded eyes of a much lighter tint, a kind of blue green. The eyes generally twinkled with good-humour and happiness, the wide, genial mouth was vivid with life and pleasant tolerance, as a rule.