noon
Oh , it is hard to spend a winter in a fireless cell , busy all day in dirty , disagreeable work , shivering at night on the thin straw bed till your heart seems to turn to ice in your body , and your teeth chatter so that you ca n't even swear , to say nothing of the horrible vermin , the loathsome food , the tyrannical jailers -- a grave in summer is almost better than the prison in winter . '' Panna made no reply , and the conversation stopped ; but her father 's last words had not failed to make a deep impression upon her imagination . She clung to the pictures he had conjured before her mind ; she found pleasure in them , painted them in still more vivid hues , experienced a degree of consolation in them . While she was working in the house , her thoughts were with Abonyi in his prison ; she saw him in the degrading convict-dress , with chains on his feet , as she had so often found her father when she visited him in jail ; there he sat in a little dusky cell on a projecting part of the wall , eating from a wooden bowl filled with a thin broth , repulsive in appearance and smell and biting pieces of earth-colored bread as hard as a brick ; the cell was impregnated with horrible odours ; the bare stone flags of the floor were icy cold ; a ragged , dirty sack of straw , and a thin , tattered coverlet swarming with vermin covered the bench in the corner ; in the morning the prisoner , like the others , was obliged to clean his cell and work at things whose contact sickened him ; at noon he walked up and down the prisonyard , amid thieves and robbers , who jeered at and insulted the great gentleman ; the jailers assailed him with rough words , perhaps even blows -- yes , perhaps , her father was right , possibly Abonyi might have been better off lying in the grave than enduring the disgrace and hardships of the prison . She gave herself up to these ideas , which almost amounted to hallucinations , with actual delight ; she even spoke of them , told the neighbours about them as if they were facts which she had witnessed , and when , early in February , a peasant who had been sentenced to a year 's imprisonment in the county jail for horse-stealing , was released and returned to Kisfalu , Panna was one of the first who visited him and asked if he had seen Abonyi in the county prison . `` Why , of course , '' replied the ex-convict , grinning . Panna 's eyes sparkled .