rally and visibly, between desire and fear, but at the sound of
her voice he shook with rage.

'Curses on you that ever you came here,' he said. 'If you go free I
shall lose my dandling thing.'

He made as if to catch her by the wrist; but changing his purpose, ran
from the room, shouting:

'Ho la!... Throck ... morton ... That ... is not....' His voice was
lost in reverberations and echoes.

In the darkness she stood desolately still. She thought of how Romans
would have awaited their captors: the ideal of a still and worthy
surrender was part of her blood. Here was the end of her cord; she
must fold her hands. She folded her hands. After all, she thought,
what was death?

'It is to pass from the hardly known to the hardly unknown.' She
quoted Lucretius. It was very dark all around her: the noises of
distant outcries reached her dimly.

'_Vix ignotum_,' she repeated mechanically, and then the words:
'Surely it were better to pass from the world of unjust judges to sit
with the mighty....'

A great burst of sound roamed, vivid and alive, from the distant
stairhead. She started and cried out. Then there came the sound of
feet hastily stepping the stair treads, coming upwards. A man was
coming to lay hands upon her!

Then, suddenly she was running, breathing hard, filled with the fear
of a man's touch. At last, in front of her was a pale, leaded window;
she turned to the right; she was in a long corridor; she ran; it
seemed that she ran for miles. She was gasping, 'For pity! for pity!'
to the saints of heaven. She stayed to listen; there was a silence,
then a voice in the distance. She listened and listened. The feet
began to run again, the sole of one shoe struck the ground hard, the
other scarcely sounded. She could not tell whether they came towards
her or no. Then she began to run again, for it was certain now that
they came towards her. As if at the sound of her own feet the
footfalls came faster. Desperately, she lifted one foot and tore her
shoe off, then the other. She half overbalanced, and catching at the
arras to save herself, it fell with a rustling sound. She craved for
darkness; when she ran there was a pale shimmer of night--but the
aperture of an arch tempted her. She ran and sprang, upwards, in a
very black, narrow stairway.

At the top there was--light! and the passage ended in a window. A
great way off, a pine torch was stuck in a wall, a knave in armour sat
on the floor beneath it--the hea