In all the crime and vice and moral gloom of the great pest-house of the capital, he stood alone, marked and singled out by his great guilt, a Lucifer among the devils.

The other prisoners were a host, hiding and sheltering each other--a crowd like that without the walls.

He was one man against the whole united concourse; a single, solitary, lonely man, from whom the very captives in the jail fell off and shrunk appalled.
It might be that the intelligence of his capture having been bruited abroad, they had come there purposely to drag him out and kill him in the street; or it might be that they were the rioters, and, in pursuance of an old design, had come to sack the prison.

But in either case he had no belief or hope that they would spare him.

Every shout they raised, and every sound they made, was a blow upon his heart.