“I’m all right now,” Jean said faintly. “I suddenly felt queer. I think the air must be very bad in this place.”
“Of course it is,” he agreed, “no draught through.”
And then he went on, this time in a very serious voice, “As I’ve said so much, miss, I’ll say just one thing more to ye——”
“Yes?” she said questioningly, standing away from the door. She had no idea what he was going to say, and yet somehow she felt horribly afraid.
“’Anging, as now practised,” he observed, “is a very merciful form of death. It isn’t ’anging at all, so to speak—they just breaks the poor chap’s neck and it’s all over in a second! ’E don’t know it’s ’appening till it ’as ’appened—if you take my meaning?”
She “took his meaning” only too well, and, with a wild wish to escape from her now torturing thoughts, she turned out of that awful room of death, and almost ran along the cavernous way and so out into the fresh air.
Her guide followed, uncertain whether he had been right or wrong in saying what he had last said to her. “But there!” he said to himself, “the poor little missie may be glad to remember it some March morning.”
But when he saw her face in the daylight, he exclaimed, “Dang me! The wife’s right! I do talk too much—that I do.” And then, shamefacedly, he added: “Best say nothing of my having shown you a bit of the Old Prison, eh? I mean to the Governor?”
“Of course I won’t,” she murmured.
Soon they reached the great gate, and then the man took hold of Jean Bower’s arm.