He shambled away, afraid that his neighbors should see the little thing which he had done.
She was left alone.
It began to grow dark. She felt scorched with fever, and her head throbbed. Long hunger, intense fatigue, and all the agony of thought in which she had struggled on her way, had their reaction on her. She shivered where she sat on the damp straw which they had cast upon the stones; and strange noises sang in her ears, and strange lights glimmered and flashed before her eyes. She did not know what ailed her.
The dogs came and smelt at her, and one little early robin sang a twilight song in an elder-bush near. These were the only things that had any pity on her.
By-and-by, when it was quite night, they opened the grated door and thrust in another captive, a vagrant they had found drunk or delirious on the highroad, whom they locked up for the night, that on the morrow they might determine what to do with him.
He threw himself heavily forward as he was pushed in by the old soldier whose place it was to guard the miserable den.
She shrank away into the farthest corner of the den, and crouched there, breathing heavily, and staring with dull, dilated eyes.
She thought,—surely they could not mean to leave them there alone, all the night through, in the horrible darkness.
The slamming of the iron door answered her; and the old soldier, as he turned the rusty key in the lock, grumbled that the world was surely at a pretty pass, when two tramps became too coy to roost together. And he stumbled up the ladder-like stairs of the guard-house to his own little chamber; and there, smoking and drinking, and playing dominoes with a comrade, dismissed his prisoners from his recollection.
Meanwhile, the man whom he had thrust into the cell was stretched where he had fallen, drunk or insensible, and moaning heavily.