The two went together so a few paces, without speaking.  Then she had a sudden impulse.

“And do you ever think of what may come upon you?” she asked.  “Do you ever think of the end?

“Aye,” he said.

“And what do you think the end will be?”

She saw him raise his eyes to her an instant.

“I think,” he said, “that I shall die for my faith some day.”

That same strange shiver that passed over her at her mother’s bedside, passed over her again, as if material things grew thin about her.  There was a tone in his voice that made it absolutely clear to her that he was not speaking of a fancy, but of some certain knowledge that he had.  Yet she dared not ask him, and she was a middle-aged woman before the news came to her of his death upon the rack.

IV

It was a sleepy-eyed young man that came into the kitchen early next morning, where the ladies and the maids were hard at work all together upon the business of baking.  The baking was a considerable task each week, for there were not less than twenty mouths, all told, to feed in the hall day by day, including a widow or two that called each day for rations; and a great part, therefore, of a mistress’s time in such houses was taken up with such things.

Marjorie turned to him, with her arms floured to the elbow.

“Well?” she said, smiling.

“I have done, mistress.  Will it please you to see it before I go and sleep?”

They had examined the house carefully last night, measuring and sounding in the deep and thin walls alike, for there was at present no convenience at all for a hunted man.  Owen had obtained her consent to two or three alternative proposals, and she had then left him to himself.  From her bed, that she had had prepared, with Alice Babington’s, in a loft—­turning out for the night the farm-men who had usually slept there, she had heard more than once the sound of distant hammering from the main front of the house where her own room lay, that had been once her mother’s as well.

The possibilities in this little manor were small.  To construct a passage, giving an exterior escape, as had been made in some houses, would have meant here a labour of weeks, and she had told the young man she would be content with a simple hiding-hole.  Yet, although she did not expect great things, and knew, moreover, the kind of place that he would make, she was as excited as a child, in a grave sort of way, at what she would see.

He took her first into the parlour, where years ago Robin had talked with her in the wintry sunshine.  The open chimney was on the right as they entered, and though she knew that somewhere on that same side would be one of the two entrances that had been arranged, all the difference she could see was that a piece of the wall-hanging that had been between the window and the fire was gone, and that there hung in its place