was
now so faint as to require extraneous force--poor Lois! who should have
been carried and tended lovingly in her state of exhaustion, but,
instead, was so detested by the multitude, who looked upon her as an
accomplice of Satan in all his evil doings, that they cared no more how
they treated her than a careless boy minds how he handles the toad that
he is going to throw over the wall.

When Lois came to her full senses, she found herself lying on a short
hard bed in a dark square room, which she at once knew must be a part
of the city gaol. It was about eight feet square, it had stone walls on
every side, and a grated opening high above her head, letting in all
the light and air that could enter through about a square foot of
aperture. It was so lonely, so dark to that poor girl, when she came
slowly and painfully out of her long faint. She did so want human help
in that struggle which always supervenes after a swoon; when the effort
is to clutch at life, and the effort seems too much for the will. She
did not at first understand where she was; did not understand how she
came to be there, nor did she care to understand. Her physical instinct
was to lie still and let the hurrying pulses have time to calm. So she
shut her eyes once more. Slowly, slowly the recollection of the scene
in the meeting-house shaped itself into a kind of picture before her.
She saw within her eyelids, as it were, that sea of loathing faces all
turned towards her, as towards something unclean and hateful. And you
must remember, you who in the nineteenth century read this account,
that witchcraft was a real terrible sin to her, Lois Barclay, two
hundred years ago. The look on their faces, stamped on heart and brain,
excited in her a sort of strange sympathy. Could it, oh God!--could it
be true, that Satan had obtained the terrific power over her and her
will, of which she had heard and read? Could she indeed be possessed by
a demon and be indeed a witch, and yet till now have been unconscious
of it? And her excited imagination recalled, with singular vividness,
all she had ever heard on the subject--the horrible midnight sacrament,
the very presence and power of Satan. Then remembering every angry
thought against her neighbour, against the impertinences of Prudence,
against the overbearing authority of her aunt, against the persevering
crazy suit of Manasseh, the indignation--only that morning, but such
ages off in real time--at Faith's injusti