silver armlets richly chased.

Noting all these details, the fantastic awfulness of his position
smote him with redoubled force,--and he felt as a madman may feel
when his impending doom has not entirely asserted itself,--when
only grotesque and leering suggestions of madness cloud his
brain,--when hideous faces, dimly discerned, loom out of the chaos
of his nightly visions,--and when all the air seems solid
darkness, with one white line of fire cracking it asunder in the
midst, and that the fire of his own approaching frenzy. Such a
delirium of agony possessed Alwyn at that moment,--he could have
shrieked, laughed, groaned, wept, and fallen down in the dust
before these bearded armed men, praying them to slay him with
their weapons there where he stood, and put him mercifully and at
once out of his mysterious misery. But an invisible influence
stronger than himself, prevented him from becoming altogether the
victim of his own torturing emotions, and he remained erect and
still as a marble figure, with a wondering, white piteous face of
such unutterable affliction that the officer who watched him
seemed touched, and, advancing, clapped his shoulder in a friendly
manner.

"Come, come!" he said--"Thou need'st fear nothing,--we are not the
men to blab of thy trespass against the city's edict,--for, of a
truth, there is too much whispering away of young and goodly lives
nowadays. What!--thou art not the first gay gallant, nor wilt thou
be the last, that has seen the world turn upside down in a haze of
love and late feasting! If thou hast not slept long enough, why
sleep again an thou wilt,--but not here..."