The Argosy — page 270: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

In the Dead of Night. 2409 kept a profound secret, and a profound secret it was kept. ‘The wit- nesses were Mrs. Garside, Hoskyns, Mr. Dux, the governor, andthe chief warder. Beyond these four, and the chaplain, the knowledge did not extend. Even the turnkeys whose duty is was to attend to Lionel had no suspicion of what had taken place. Three weeks had come and gone since the marriage of Lionel and Edith when Tom Bristow first set foot inside the gaol. CHAPTER XLT. A DINNER AT PINCOTE. LIONEL DERING was blessed with one of those equable dispositions which predispose their owner to look always at the sunny side of every- thing ; and even now, in prison, and with such a terrible accusation hanging over him, no one ever saw him downhearted or in any way distressed. There was about him a serenity, a quiet cheerfulness, which nothing seemed able to disturb; and when in the company of others he was usually as gay and animated as if the four walls of his. cell had been those of his own study at Park Newton. The ordeah was, In any case, a very trying one; but it would have been infinitely more so but for the sweet offices of love and friendship which he owed, in one case to his wife, and in the other to hisfriend. Either Edith or Tom saw him every day. But when all his visitors had gone, and night and silence had settled down on the grim old prison—silence so profound that but for the recurring voice of a distant clock, as it counted the hours slowly and solemnly, he could have fancied himself the last man left alive in the world—then it was that he felt his situa- tion the most. He had been so used to an active, outdoor life that he could not now tire himself sufficiently to sleep well. | It was these hours of darkness, when the rest of the world was abed,. and the long, long hours of daylight in the early summer mornings. before it was yet awake, which tried him more than anything else. At such times, when he was tired of reading—and he had never before read so much inso short a space of time—he could do nothing but lie back on his pallet, with his arms curled under his head, and think. The mornings were balmy, soft, and bright. Through the cell-: casement, which he could open at will, he could hear the merry twit- _ tering of innumerable sparrows. He could see the slow shadows sliding, inch by inch, down the grey stone walls of the prison yard, as. the sun rose higher in the sky. Now and then the sweet west wind brought him faint wafts of fragrance from the hay-slopes just-outside. the prison gates. Sometimes he could hear the barking of a dog on some far-off farm, or the dull lowing of cattle : sounds which reminded. him that the great world, with its life, and hopes, and fears, lay close: LGC () COMM SS) (C(O) mM =S)