Here again I find it very hard to say all that I felt during that search.  My thoughts came and went like pictures upon the dark.  Now my heart would so beat that it sickened me, of sheer terror that I should be found; and this especially when a man would stay for a while talking on the stairs within an arm’s length of where I lay:  now it was as I might say, more of the intellect; and I pondered on what I heard my Cousin Tom say, and marvelled at his shrewdness; for fear, if it does not drive away wits, sharpens them wonderfully.  He had, of course, put me in greater peril, by saying that I was gone to Rome; but he had saved himself very adroitly, for no witness in the house could tell that I had not done so; for here was my chamber empty, and I and my man and my clothes and my books and my horses all vanished away.  At one time, then, I was all eyes and ears in the muffled dark, hearing my heart thump as it had been another’s; at another time I would be looking within and contemplating my own fear.

Again and again, however, I thought of my Cousin Dorothy and wondered where she was and what she was at.  I had not heard her voice all that time; and, on a sudden, after the men had been in the house near an hour I should say, I heard her sob suddenly, close to me, in a terrified kind of voice.

“Keep them, Nancy, keep them here as long as you can.  It will give him—­”

“Eh?” said a man’s voice suddenly beneath.  “What was that?”

“I said nothing,” stammered my Cousin Dolly’s voice.

Well; there was a to-do.  The fellow beneath called out to Mr. Harris, who was upstairs; and I heard him come down.  My Cousin Dolly was sobbing and crying out, and so was the maid Nancy to whom she had spoken.  At first I could make nothing of it, nor why she had said what she had; and then, as I heard them all go into the parlour together, I understood that if my Cousin Tom had been shrewd, his daughter had been shrewder; and had said what she had, knowing that a man was within earshot.

But there was nothing for me to do but to lie there still; for I could hear nothing from the parlour but a confused sound of voices, now three or four speaking at once, now a man’s voice (which I took to be the magistrate’s), and now, I thought my Cousin Dolly’s.  I heard, too, above me, my Cousin Tom speaking very angrily, and understood that he was kept from his daughter—­which was the best thing in the world for me, since he might very well have spoiled the whole design.  At last I heard Dolly cry out very loud; then I heard the parlour-door open and three or four men came tumbling out, who ran beneath my hiding-hole and out through the kitchen passage to the stable.  I was all a-tremble now, especially at my cousin’s cry; but I gave her credit for being as shrewd still as I had heard her to be on the stairs; and I proved right in the event; for almost immediately after that my Cousin Tom was let come downstairs, and I heard every word, of the colloquy.