It was eleven of the forenoon. Wilfrid strove to dissociate his
recollection of clear daylight from the pressure of the hideous
featureless time surrounding him. He asked: "What week?" It was the
first week in March. Wilfrid could not keep from sobbing aloud. In the
early period of such a captivity, imagination, deprived of all other
food, conjures phantasms for the employment of the brain; but there is
still some consciousness within the torpid intellect wakeful to laugh at
them as they fly, though they have held us at their mercy. The face of
time had been imaged like the withering mask of a corpse to him. He had
felt, nevertheless, that things had gone on as we trust them to do at the
closing of our eyelids: he had preserved a mystical remote faith in the
steady running of the world above, and hugged it as his most precious
treasure. A thunder was rolled in his ears when he heard of the flight
of two months at one bound. Two big months! He would have guessed, at
farthest, two weeks. "I have been two months in one shirt? Impossible!"
he exclaimed. His serious idea (he cherished it for the support of his
reason) was, that the world above had played a mad prank since he had
been shuffled off its stage.

"It can't be March," he said. "Is there sunlight overhead?"

"It is a true Milanese March," Rinaldo replied.

"Why am I kept a prisoner?"

"I cannot say. There must be some idea of making use of you."

"Have you arms?"

"I have none."