I had somehow never expected to be used with positive violence in the world of spirits, and least of all in that lazy and good-natured place.  Considering, too, the errand on which I had come, not for my own convenience but for the sake of another, my treatment seemed to me very hard.  What was still more humiliating was the fact that my spirit seemed just as powerless in the hands of these ruffians as my body would have been on earth.  I was pushed, hustled, insulted, hurt.  I could have summoned Amroth to my aid, but I felt too proud for that; yet the thought of the cragmen, and the possibility of the second death, did visit my mind with dismal iteration.  I did not at all desire a further death; I felt very much alive, and full of interest and energy.  Worst of all was my sense that Cynthia had gone over to the enemy.  I had been so loftily kind with her, that I much resented having appeared in her sight as feeble and ridiculous.  It is difficult to preserve any dignity of demeanour or thought, with a man’s hand at one’s neck and his knee in one’s back:  and I felt that Lucius had displayed a really Satanical malignity in using this particular means of degrading me in Cynthia’s sight, and of regaining his own lost influence.

I was thrust and driven before my captors along an alley in the garden, and what added to my discomfiture was that a good many people ran together to see us pass, and watched me with decided amusement.  I was taken finally to a little pavilion of stone, with heavily barred windows, and a flagged marble floor.  The room was absolutely bare, and contained neither seat nor table.  Into this I was thrust, with some obscene jesting, and the door was locked upon me.

The time passed very heavily.  At intervals I heard music burst out among the alleys, and a good many people came to peep in upon me with an amused curiosity.  I was entirely bewildered by my position, and did not see what I could have done to have incurred my punishment.  But in the solitary hours that followed I began to have a suspicion of my fault.  I had found myself hitherto the object of so much attention and praise, that I had developed a strong sense of complacency and self-satisfaction.  I had an uncomfortable suspicion that there was even more behind, but I could not, by interrogating my mind and searching out my spirits, make out clearly what it was; yet I felt I was having a sharp lesson; and this made me resolve that I would ask for no kind of assistance from Amroth or any other power, but that I would try to meet whatever fell upon me with patience, and extract the full savour of my experience.