“Stone walls do not a prison make,” I quoted gaily.
“Ecod, they make a pretty fair imitation of one!” he chuckled.
I was prodigious glad to see him.
His presence stirred my sluggish blood. The sound of his voice was to me like the crack of a whip to a jaded horse. Graceful, careless, debonair, a man of evil from sheer reckless wilfulness, he was the one person in the world I found it in my heart to both hate and admire at the same time.
He gazed long at me. “You’re looking devilish ill, Montagu,” he said.
I smiled. “Are you afraid I’ll cheat the hangman after all?”
His eyes wandered over the cell again. “By Heaven, this death’s cage is enough to send any man off the hooks,” he shivered.
“One gets used to it,” I answered, shrugging.
He looked at me with a kind of admiration. “They may break you, Montagu, but I vow they will never bend you. Here are you torn with illness, the shadow of the gallows falling across your track, and never a whimper out of you.”
“Would that avail to better my condition?”