“I’ll be with you in a moment, mistress,” said his voice; and they heard his steps go on into the dark and cease.

Marjorie stood passive; she could feel the girl’s hands clasp her arm, and could hear her breath come like sobs.  But before she could speak, a light shone somewhere on the roof; and almost immediately the man came back carrying another flambeau.  He called to them civilly; they followed.  Marjorie once trod on some soft, damp thing that crackled beneath her foot.  They groped round one more corner; waited, while they heard a key turning in a lock.  Then the man stood aside, and they went past into the room.  A figure was standing there; but for the first moment they could see no more.  Great shadows fled this way and that as the gaoler hung up the flambeau.  Then the door closed again behind them; and Elizabeth flung herself into her husband’s arms.

II

When Marjorie could see him, as at last he put his wife into the single chair that stood in the cell and gave her the stool, himself sitting upon the table, she was shocked by the change in his face.  It was true that she had only the wavering light of the flambeau to see him by (for the single barred window was no more than a pale glimmer on the wall), yet even that shadowy illumination could not account for his paleness and his fallen face.  He was dressed miserably, too; his clothes were disordered and rusty-looking; and his features looked out, at once pinched and elongated.  He blinked a little from time to time; his lips twitched beneath his ill-cut moustache and beard; and little spasms passed, as he talked, across his whole face.  It was pitiful to see him; and yet more pitiful to hear him talk; for he assumed a kind of courtesy, mixed with bitterness.  Now and again he fell silent, glancing with a swift and furtive movement of his eyes from one to the other of his visitors and back again.  He attempted to apologise for the miserableness of the surroundings in which he received them—­saying that her Grace his hostess could not be everywhere at once; and that her guests must do the best that they could.  And all this was mixed with sudden wails from his wife, sudden graspings of his hands by hers.  It all seemed to the quiet girl, who sat ill-at-ease on the little three-legged stool, that this was not the way to meet adversity.  Then she drove down her criticism; and told herself that she ought rather to admire one of Christ’s confessors.

“And you bring me no hope, then, Mistress Manners?” he said presently (for she had told him that there was no talk yet of any formal trial)—­“no hope that I may meet my accusers face to face?  I had thought perhaps—­”

He lifted his eyes swiftly to hers, and dropped them again.

She shook her head.

“And yet that is all that I ask now—­only to meet my accusers.  They can prove nothing against me—­except, indeed, my recusancy; and that they have known this long time back.  They can prove nothing as to the harbouring of any priests—­not within the last year, at any rate, for I have not done so.  It seemed to me—­”