Mr.Johnson quietly took care to see that the turnkey who accompanied Ellinor was "obliging." The man took her across high-walled courts, along stone corridors, and through many locked doors, before they came to the condemned cells.
"I've had three at a time in here," said he, unlocking the final door, "after Judge Morton had been here.

We always called him the 'Hanging Judge.' But its five years since he died, and now there's never more than one in at a time; though once it was a woman for poisoning her husband.

Mary Jones was her name." The stone passage out of which the cells opened was light, and bare, and scrupulously clean.

Over each door was a small barred window, and an outer window of the same description was placed high up in the cell, which the turnkey now opened.
Old Abraham Dixon was sitting on the side of his bed, doing nothing.

His head was bent, his frame sunk, and he did not seem to care to turn round and see who it was that entered.
Ellinor tried to keep down her sobs while the man went up to him, and laying his hand on his shoulder, and lightly shaking him, he said: "Here's a friend come to see you, Dixon." Then, turning to Ellinor, he added, "There's some as takes it in this kind o' stunned way, while others are as restless as a wild beast in a cage, after they're sentenced." And then he withdrew into the passage, leaving the door open, so that he could see all that passed if he chose to look, but ostentatiously keeping his eyes averted, and whistling to himself, so that he could not hear what they said to each other.
Dixon looked up at Ellinor, but then let his eyes fall on the ground again; the increasing trembling of his shrunken frame was the only sign he gave that he had recognised her.
She sat down by him, and took his large horny hand in hers.