Again she stared at him, blind and bewildered.

He went on steadily: 

“And now it is you again who bring me the first news of my passion.  It is yourself, first and last, under God, that have brought me all these graces and crosses.  And I thank you with all my heart....  But you must pray for me to the end, and after it, too.”

CHAPTER VIII

I

“Water,” said a sharp voice, pricking through the enormous thickness of the bloodshot dark that had come down on him.  There followed a sound of floods; then a sense of sudden coolness, and he opened his eyes once more, and became aware of unbearable pain in arms and feet.  Again the whirling dark, striped with blood colour, fell on him like a blanket; again the sound of waters falling and the sense of coolness, and again he opened his eyes.

* * * * *

For a minute or two it was all that he could do to hold himself in consciousness.  It appeared to him a necessity to do so.  He could see a smoke-stained roof of beams and rafters, and on these he fixed his eyes, thinking that he could hold himself so, as by thin, wiry threads of sight, from falling again into the pit where all was black or blood-colour.  The pain was appalling, but he thought he had gripped it at last, and could hold it so, like a wrestler.

As the pain began to resolve itself into throbs and stabs, from the continuous strain in which at first it had shown itself—­a strain that was like a shrill horn blowing, or a blaze of bluish light—­he began to see more, and to understand a little.  There were four or five faces looking down on him:  one was the face of a man he had seen somewhere in an inn ... it was at Fotheringay; it was my lord Shrewsbury’s man.  Another was a lean face; a black hat came and went behind it; the lips were drawn in a sort of smile, so that he could see the teeth....  Then he perceived next that he himself was lying in a kind of shallow trough of wood upon the floor.  He could see his bare feet raised a little and tied with cords.

Then, one by one, these sights fitted themselves into one another and made sense.  He remembered that he was in Derby gaol—­not in his own cell; that the lean face was of a man called Topcliffe; that a physician was there as well as the others; that they had been questioning him on various points, and that some of these points he had answered, while others he had not, and must not.  Some of them concerned her Grace of the Scots....  These he had answered.  Then, again, association came back....

“As Thy arms, O Christ ...” he whispered.

“Now then,” came the sharp voice in his ear, so close and harsh as to distress him.  “These questions again....  Were there any other places besides at Padley and Booth’s Edge, in the parish of Hathersage, where you said mass?”