Time, as once before in his experience, seemed wholly banished from this place.  There were moments of reflection when he appeared to himself as having but just entered; there were other moments when he might have been here for an eternity that had no divisions to mark it.  He was in complete and utter darkness.  There was not a crack anywhere in the woodwork (so perfect had been the young carpenter’s handiwork) by which even a glimmer of light could enter.  A while ago he had been in the early morning sunlight; now he might be in the grave.

For a while his emotions and his thoughts raced one another, tumbling in inextricable confusion; and they were all emotions and thoughts of the present:  intense little visions of the men closing round the house, cutting off escape from the valley on the one side and from the wild upland country on the other; questions as to where Mr. John would hide himself; minute sensible impressions of the smoky flavour of the air, the unplaned woodwork, the soft stuffs beneath his feet.  Then they began to extend themselves wider, all with that rapid unjarring swiftness:  he foresaw the bursting in of his stronghold; the footsteps within three inches of his head; the crash as the board was kicked in:  then the capture; the ride to Derby, bound on a horse; the gaol; the questioning; the faces of my lord Shrewsbury and the magistrates ... and the end....

There were moments when the sweat ran down his face, when he bit his lips in agony, and nearly moaned aloud.  There were others in which he abandoned himself to Christ crucified; placed himself in Everlasting Hands that were mighty enough to pluck him not only out of this snare, but from the very hands that would hold him so soon; Hands that could lift him from the rack and scaffold and set him a free man among his hills again:  yet that had not done so with a score of others whom he knew.  He thought of these, and of the girl who had done so much to save them all, who was now saved herself by sickness, a mile or two away, from these hideous straits.  Then he dragged out Mr. Maine’s beads and began to recite the “Mysteries."...

* * * * *

There broke in suddenly the first exterior sign that the hunters were on them—­a muffled hammering far beneath his feet.  There were pauses; then voices carried up from the archway nearly beneath through the hollowed walls; then hammering again; but all was heard as through wool.

As the first noise broke out his mind rearranged itself and seemed to have two consciousnesses.  In the foreground he followed, intently and eagerly, every movement below; in the background, there still moved before him the pageant of deeper thoughts and more remote—­of prayer and wonder and fear and expectation; and from that onwards it continued so with him.  Even while he followed the sounds, he understood why my lord Shrewsbury had made this assault so suddenly, after months of peace....  He perceived the hand of Thomas FitzHerbert, too, in the precision with which the attack had been made, and the certain information he must have given that priests would be in Padley that morning.