He went back to his cell and sat down on his three-legged stool. After a while, still seated, he began to slide the stool across the steel floor in little jumps, his eyes, meanwhile, turned upward attentively. When thus, in small tentative slides, he had covered the few square yards of the cell’s free area, he returned to a point near the centre, moved a fraction of an inch forward, then a still smaller fraction to the right, and was still, his big clasped hands hanging loosely between his knees, his face turned upward. The posture emphasised the heaviness of his jaw, the ugly lines from ends of nostrils to corners of mouth; but even then, it was an attitude almost of prayer.
He was gazing, past the bars, on and up through a little window near the ceiling of the cell-house, at a patch of sky. It was a little patch, irregularly framed by the top and right side of his cell-door and the sill and left side of the window, and slashed angularly by the roof of a near building; and exactly where he sat it showed a bit larger than it did from any other
