The baron grasped the cord tightly.

Onward they wandered, and still naught but rushes and flags, sedges and dried reeds, met their gaze, until a promontory of firm ground—­a rock of deep red sandstone—­rose from the mire, above their heads—­distant, it might be, a bow shot.

The baron uttered a sigh of relief, when his horse stumbled; the poor brute strove to recover his footing, and sank deeper into the treacherous quicksand.  Over went the Baron, over his horse’s head.

Ordgar snatched at the cord; it escaped Hugo’s grasp; the guide was amidst the reeds, and in one moment he had made his escape; the reeds parted, waved again, higher than the head of the fugitive, and the baron saw him no more; only a mocking laugh arose to augment the rage of the baffled tyrant.

But that rage was speedily changed to terror, for, as the baron rose, his feet sank beneath him, and he felt as if some unseen hand had grasped them in the tenacity of the quicksand, just as a faint cloud of smoke rolled by overhead.

Meanwhile the men in the rear were pressing on, and the foremost advanced to help their leader and his struggling steed; but all who did so were soon in the mire in like fashion, sinking deeper with each struggle.

Oh, how awful that sucking, clasping feeling beneath the surface of the earth, that gradual sinking out of sight—­a process lasting perhaps for hours.  But hours were not given to Baron Hugo; for at this moment the awful cry of “Fire!” “Fire!” was heard on all sides, and a loud mocking shout of laughter from hundreds of unseen enemies, now safe on the firm ground beyond the Swamp, was the answer.

A cloud of thick smoke rolled over the reeds, and cries of distress and anguish arose yet more loudly.

“Death to the incendiary! let him who burnt the monks of St. Wilfred die by fire himself as is meet!”

The latter cry arose from the borders of the Swamp, hidden from sight by thick eddying billows of smoke.

A flashing sheet of flame, then another—­clouds of thick smoke rolling above—­the crackling of flame, devouring the dry herbage—­stifling heat, yet more unendurable each moment—­suffocation impending as the air became thicker and denser.

Held by the quicksand, and sinking deeper and deeper—­only raised above the ground from the middle of the body; so Hugo awaited his just fate—­and felt it just.

“Oh for an hour to repent! oh for a priest!  My sins have found me out.”

A sudden gust of wind opened a passage through the smoke, and revealed in the lurid light of the flames—­Wilfred of Aescendune!

For a moment the baron thought himself dead, and at the judgment seat; then as he saw his supposed victim standing in safety, afar off on the high rock, and pointing out the scene, with awe yet exultation on his youthful face, he grasped, as in a moment, the whole secret of the forces which had been arrayed against him, and tasted an agony bitterer than that of death.