He turned and pushed open his door, lurching forward across the threshold with dragging feet. A moment later Dulcima passed my cell, her trembling hands over her eyes.
I went to my cot and lay down, face buried, teeth set in my lip. A numbness which at moments dulled the throbbing of my brain seemed to settle like chains on every limb.
Dully I waited for the strokes of the iron bell sounding the seventh hour; a lassitude crept over me—almost a stupor. It was not despair; I had long passed that; it was Hope, slowly dying within my body.
A few moments afterwards a strange movement inside my cell aroused me, and I opened my hot eyes.
In the dusk I saw the figure of a man seated beside my cot; peering closer, I perceived his eyes were fixed steadily on me. I sat up on my bed and asked him what he desired.
He did not answer. A ray of candle-light stealing through the barred window fell on the bright barrel of a pistol which lay across his knees.
"What do you wish?" I repeated, the truth dawning on me. "Can you not watch me from the corridor as well as in my cell?"
There was no reply.
Then at last I understood that this gray shape brooding there at my bedside was a guard of the death-watch, pledged never to leave me, never to take his eyes from me for an instant until the warden of the prison delivered me into the hands of the sheriff on the morrow for my execution.
Ding-dong! Ding-dong! The prison bell was at last striking the seventh hour. I lay still in my blanket, counting the strokes which rang out in thin, peevish monotony, like the cracked voice of a beldame repeating her petty woes.