His face was still turned to the window.
"Time! time!" he went on in a low voice, charged with passion.

"It eats us all! Brr--how I hate it! How I hate the grave! There lies the sting, Mademoiselle--the torture to be a captive: to feel one's best days slipping away, and fate still denying to us poor devils the chance which even the luckiest--God knows--find little enough." He laughed, and to Dorothea the laugh sounded passing bitter.

"You will not understand how a man feels; how even so unimportant a creature as I must bear a sort of personal grudge against his fate." "I am trying to understand," said Dorothea, gently.
"But this you can understand, how a prisoner loves the sunshine: not because, through his grating, it warms him; but because it is the sunshine, and he sees it.

Mademoiselle, I am not grateful; I see merely, and adore.

Some day you shall pause by this window and see a cloud of dust on the Fosse Way--the last of us prisoners as they march us from Axcester to the place of our release; and, seeing it, you shall close the book upon a chapter, but not without remembering"-- he touched her hand again, but now his fingers closed on it, and he raised it to his lips,--"not without remembering how and when one Frenchman said, 'God bless you, Mademoiselle Dorothea!'" Dorothea's eyes were wet when, a moment later, Narcissus came bustling through the atrium with a roll of papers in his hand.
"Ah, this is luck!" he cried.