Next morning he received a hurried summons to the Governor of the Prison's room, and there he heard that Bennet, in spite of the fact that he was constantly watched night and day, had somehow managed to open a vein in his arm and had bled to death in the night.
"The warder, who was guarding him at the time," said the Governor, "saw him lying on his bed fast asleep, as he supposed; when it was daylight blood was noticed on the floor, and then it was found that Bennet was dead."
"But how did he get an instrument with which to open a vein in his arm?" asked Deakin, aghast.
"The surgeon says," answered the Governor, "that the vein was bitten open. The act was done with great determination. You saw him yesterday, I believe; was there anything in what you told him to account for the deed?"
"I brought him news that greatly disappointed him, but nothing to account for this. Poor devil!"
When Bennet's death became public, there were many who said he had cheated the gallows, and few mourned for the lost life and the career gone fatally wrong.
Even Kitty Thornton, in her kind heart, could not sincerely say she was sorry he was dead. Indeed, in the years that came after, she never thought of Harry Bennet without growing quiet and pensive far beyond her wont, as she reflected how, in one way and another, she had been saved from him.
Gilbert Eversleigh and Kitty Thornton did not come together at once again--the shadow of Bennet lay between them, but in the course of time they did, as was inevitable.
"When thou doest well unto thyself," said the satirist, "all men will speak well of thee."
And Gilbert Eversleigh, the rising barrister, backed by the beauty and wealth of his wife, is spoken well of by all the world.
The other side of life's double shield is to be seen at Ivydene, where there may be beheld, nursed and tended by a wife's unchanging love, and a daughter's unalterable affection, a white-haired, bent figure, from whose loose lips there comes the question, over and over again, "What o'clock is it? What o'clock is it?"
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of Lincoln's Inn, by Robert Machray