Who wrote it?

"Silently, surreptitiously, as the unacknowledged autumn changed to winter outside, a warmth and glow suffused the House of Correction, a glow so inappropriate to the season that the Countess herself felt the effects of the palpable change of temperature within, so she would sweat, yet she could not, no matter how hard she looked, detect a single visible change in the mechanical order she had laid down and, even though she gave up sleeping altogether and introduced a hysterical randomness into her revolvings, so that she sometimes made herself quite giddy and sometimes stuck stock-still for almost an entire minute by the authority of the clock, she never saw one suspicious thing.

She never thought the guards might turn against her; did she not keep their contracts in a locked iron box in her watch-room? Had she not bought them? Were they not forbidden discourse with the inmates? Did not the forbidden thing itself forbid?

Her white eyes were now veined and rimmed with red. As she went round and round, she drummed nervous tattoos on the arm of her chair.

The notes, the drawings, the caresses, the glances - all said, in various ways, 'if only', and 'I long . . .' And the clock ticked the time of another lifetime, another place, above the gateway that grew each day larger in their imaginations until the clock and the gateway that had signified the end of hope now spoke to them of nothing but hope.

So it was an army of lovers who finally rose up against the Countess on the morning when the cages opened for the final exercise hour . . ."

David Morgan won last month's Who Wrote It, identifying the excerpt from The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. The first entry identifying the above piece and its author, drawn after the close of entries on Friday, July 11, will receive a $30 voucher from University House.

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