to London; though it will be to-morrow morning if you go on in this way."
"I'll tell you what it is, Gus," replied the red-haired gentleman, "nobody who hadn't gone through what I've gone through could tell what I feel to-night. I think, Gus, I shall end by being mad in real earnest; and that my release will do what my imprisonment even couldn't effect—turn my brain. But I say, Gus, tell me, tell me the truth; did any of the old fellows—did they ever think me guilty?"
"Not one of them, Dick, not one; and I know if one of them had so much as hinted at such a thought, the others would have throttled him before he could have said the words. Have another drop of brandy," he said hastily, thrusting the glass into his hand; "you've no more pluck than a kitten or a woman, Dick."
"I had pluck enough to bear eight years of that," said the young man, pointing in the direction of Slopperton, "but this does rather knock me over. My mother, you'll write to her, Gus—the sight of my hand might upset her, without a word of warning—you'll write and tell her that I've got a chance of escaping; and then you'll write and say that I have escaped. We must guard against a shock, Gus; she has suffered too much already on my account."
At this moment the bell rang for the train's starting: the young men took their seats in a second-class carriage; and away sped the engine, out through the dingy manufacturing town, into the open moonlit country.
Gus and Richard light their cigars, and wrap themselves in their railway rugs. Gus throws himself back and drops off to sleep (he can almost smoke in his sleep), and in a quarter of an hour he is dreaming of a fidgety patient who doesn't like comic songs, and who can never see the point of a joke; but who has three pretty daughters, and who pays his bill every Christmas without even looking at the items.
But Richard Marwood doesn't go to sleep. Will he ever sleep again? Will his nerves ever regain their tranquillity, after the intense excitement of the last three or four days? He looks back—looks back at that hideous time, and wonders at its hopeless suffering—wonders till he is obliged to wrench his mind away from the subject, for fear he should go mad. How did he ever endure it? How did he ever live through it? He had no means of suicide? Pshaw! he might have dashed out his brains against the wall. He might have resolutely refused food, and so have starved himself to death. How did he endure it. Eight years! Eight centuries! and every hour a fresh age of anguish! Looking back now, he knows, what then he did not know, that at the worst—that in his bitterest despair, there was a vague undefined something, so vague and undefined that he did not
