"About the person concealed upstairs," remarked the blue-eyed girl reflectively. "Yes, it's most curious."
"It's more than curious," her companion declared. "Though I haven't mentioned it to you, I've watched the house for several nights, but I must admit that I've seen nothing at all suspicious."
"Oh! Then you've been on the watch!" she cried excitedly.
"Yes, on four occasions, and all to no purpose. Last Friday I waited from nine o'clock till one in the morning, and got wet through. He returned about ten, but did not come out again."
"He was upstairs with his secret friend, I suppose," said the girl.
"No doubt. Whoever may be confined there could not exist without seeing a human face and conversing with him, even for five minutes each day, or he would certainly go mad," said Gerald. "You remember I said that Italians, who have abolished capital punishment for murder, have substituted solitary confinement. It is far more terrible. They confine the assassin in a cell in silence, without sight of a human face. Their food is placed upon a turntable which revolves into the cell, so that the prisoner never sees a face. Such torture was invented long ago in the Bastille, and in every case it drives the guilty one raving mad within five years."
"How horrible!" cried the girl.
"I admit it is, but surely the punishment is far greater than that of hanging, or even the guillotine. Both are instantaneous, yet in Italy the criminal suffers all the tortures of Dante's Inferno—and deservedly so."
"Then you saw nothing?" asked Marigold.
"I fancied a lot, but I saw really nothing to increase my suspicions. One thing we know—that he is concealing some person in that locked room. Now who can the person be?"