Lionel Dering was blessed with one of those equable dispositions¹ which predispose their owner to look always at the sunny side of everything; and even now, in prison, and with such a terrible accusation² hanging over him, no one ever saw him downhearted or in any way distressed³. There was about him a serenity⁴, a quiet cheerfulness, which nothing seemed able to disturb; and when in the company of others he was usually as gay and animated⁵ as if the four walls of his cell had been those of his own study at Park Newton. The ordeal⁶ was, in any case, a very trying one; but it would have been infinitely⁷ 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 his friend. 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 recurring⁸ 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 situation the most. He had been so used to an active, outdoor life, that he could not now tire himself sufficiently⁹ 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 in so 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 twittering of innumerable sparrows. He could see the slow shadows sliding, inch by inch, down the gray stone walls of the prison yard, as the sun rose higher in the sky. Now and then the sweet west wind brought him faint

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