There seemed a strange suggestiveness in the silence and order of the wide ward that lay before them.  The great White Tower dominated the whole place on the further side, huge and menacing, pierced by its narrow windows set at wide intervals; on the left, the row of towers used as prisons diminished in perspective down to where the wall turned at right angles and ran in behind the keep; and the great space enclosed by the whole was almost empty.  There were soldiers on guard here and there at the doorways; a servant hurried across the wide sunlit ground, and once, as they waited, a doctor in his short gown came out of one door and disappeared into another.

And here they waited for an answer to their summons, silent and happy in their knowledge.  The place held no terrors for them.

The soldier knocked again impatiently, and again stood aside.

Chris saw Nicholas sidle up to the man with something of the same awe on his face that had been there an hour ago.

“My Lord—­Master Cromwell?” he heard him whisper, correcting himself.

The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

“There,” he said.

There were three soldiers, Chris noticed, standing at the foot of one of the Towers a little distance off.  It was there, then, that Thomas Cromwell, wool-carder, waited for death, hearing, perhaps, from his window the murmur of the crowd beyond the moat, and the blows of mallet on wood as his scaffold went up.

Then the door opened, and after a word or two the soldier motioned them in.

* * * * *

Again they had to wait.

The Lieutenant, they were told, had been called away.  He was expected back presently.

They sat down, still in silence, in the little ground-floor parlour.  It was a pleasant little room, with a wide hearth, and two windows looking on to the court.

But the suspense was not like that of the morning.  Now they knew how it must end.  There would be a few minutes more, long perhaps to Ralph, as he sat in his cell somewhere not far from them, knowing nothing of the pardon that was on its way; and then the door would open, where day by day for the last six weeks the gaoler had come and gone; and the faces he knew would be there, and it would be from their lips that he would hear the message.

The old man and the girl still sat together in the window-seat, silent now like the others.  They had had their explanations in the boat, and each knew what was in the other’s heart.  Chris and Nicholas stood by the hearth, Mr. Morris by the door; and there was not the tremor of a doubt in any of them as to what the future held.