He found it tolerable at first to watch the days crawl by. He was not afraid of death; he knew that death could be prophesied for all men; he had often prophesied it himself. Even to look ahead and know that a month hence he would lie in a prison grave was no worse than to diagnose, as many a doctor must, the first budding in his own flesh that will bring death as its flower. And the routine of prison helped to a certain tranquility; in the mornings when he took exercise in the graveled yard he smiled at the sky and let the wind blow lovingly through his hair. It had gone grey during recent months, but they had not made him clip it short.

In the afternoons he read or rested or played a game of cards with the two men on guard over him, and soon after tea, because there was nothing else to do, he went to bed. It was nighttime that was the worst. He could not sleep well between midnight and dawn; and then, in those guardless hours (for the warders, against rules, usually dozed off themselves), he thought of Leni. Love is a strange thing; we may not notice the moment it comes, yet there is a moment when we know it is there — sudden wakefulness, as to pleasure or pain after sleep, a sudden color, as of a painting after an etching. So it had been for the little doctor; he remembered a moment in the courtroom, during the judge’s summing up; he had been tired after a long day in that stuffy atmosphere, and the judge’s words had droned on more and more slowly, as if they were being pushed into sound by means of an ever greater effort. A little way off in the prisoner’s dock Leni was sitting, and she too looked tired, had lapsed into a remoteness that seemed, by its very detachment from environment, an almost physical absence. The judge was going over the points of the case, one by one; and presently he said: —