CHAPTER XXIV

MY LORD BROCTON PILES UP HIS ACCOUNT On the tenth day of my captivity, hope glimmered for the first time. When a man has been penned up in a dull room for ten days, with half-a-hundred-weight of rusty iron shackling his wrists and ankles, with poor food, and little of it at that, to eat, he can extract comfort out of a trifle. In my case the trifle was a smile, her first smile in ten days. So far she had been as sulky as she was shapeless, bringing me my poor meals either without saying a word or, at best, snapping…