“Oh, go at once, Dinah, and open the door for Mrs. Raymond.  I can write your song down just as well another time,” I remonstrated, taking up and laying down my note-book as I spoke, so as to display my ostensible occupation to the peering eyes of Mrs. Clayton (now sitting bolt upright in her bed, looking like a Chinese bonze), for the purpose of sweeping in my position definitively.

“That will do, Dinah.  Now go and get Miss Monfort’s bath ready,” I heard my dragoness say, after a short whispered communication from her early visitor.  It was the idea, probably, to remove me, as well as Dinah, while the plot was being unfolded, and my bath-room, with its closed door, promised security from quick ears and eyes to the brace of conspirators now plotting their final blow.

Once in that belfry, and truly might the sense of Dante’s famous inscription become my motto for life:  “Here hope is left behind.”

I covered my eyes as I recalled that dreary, dreadful prison-house of clock and bell, into which I had clambered once by means of a movable step-ladder, rarely left there by the attendant, in order to rescue my famished cat, shut up there by accident.  I recollected the maddened look of the creature, as it flew by me like a flash, frightened out of its wits, Mrs. Austin had said, by the clicking of the machinery of the huge clock, and the chiming of the responsive bell.  Both were silent now, and there was room enough for a prisoner’s cot in that lonely and dismantled turret as there once had been for a telescope and its rest, used for astronomical purposes at long intervals by my father and a few of his scientific friends, but finally dismantled and put aside forever.

I could imagine myself a denizen, at the will of Bainrothe, of that weird, gray belfry, shut up with that silent clock, in company with a bed, a chair, and table, denied, perchance, even the comfort of a stove, for fear the flue might utter smoke, and, with it, that kind of revelation, said proverbially to accompany such manifestations; denied books, even writing-materials, the sight of a human face, and furnished with food merely sufficing in quantity and quality to keep soul and body together!

Could I resist this state of things?  Could I sustain it and retain my reason?  No, I felt that the picture my fancy drew, if realized, would make me abject and submissive, change me to a cowardly, cringing slave.  I was not made of the right stuff for martyrdom, only for battle, for resistance, and would put forth my last powers in the effort to save myself from the unendurable trials before me, even if destruction were the consequence.  A pistol-ball in my brain would be preferable to what I saw awaiting me, should Bainrothe succeed in his stratagem, as I doubted not he would do, if determined on it.  I should know freedom in its true sense never again, if that night were suffered to pass without its redemption, if that belfry once were entered.