Her heart almost stopped beating with the shock of knowing that nothing could now shield her captors from exposure.

“But—­but it will be very hard to prove,” she said, hoarsely, almost defiantly.

“You have only to take oath,” he said, meaningly.

“I don’t know the name or face of a person in that castle,” she said, deliberately.  He was silent for a full minute.

“You intend to shield them?” he demanded.  There was no answer to the question.  Now she was positive that the man was no priest, but some one who knew the world and who had made it his business to trace her and her captors to the very gates of the castle.  If he knew, then others must also be in possession of the secret.

“Who are you?” she demanded, as he drew her deeper into the wood.  There was now the wild desire to escape from her rescuer and to fly back to the kindly jailers on the hill.

“A poor priest, by the grace of God,” he said, and she heard him chuckle.

“Take me back to the road, sir!” she commanded.

“I will take you to your mother,” he said, “and to no one else.”

“But I am afraid of you,” she exclaimed, her courage going.  “I don’t know you—­I don’t know where you are taking me.”

“We will not go far to-night.  I know a place where you can hide until I secure help from the city.”

“But you said you had a wagon.”

“The horse must have strayed away, worse luck!” said he, with a raucous laugh.

She broke from his grasp suddenly, and like a frightened deer was off through the darkness knowing not whither she went or what moment she might crash against a tree.  The flight was a short one.  She heard him curse savagely as he leaped upon her from behind after a chase of a few rods, and then she swooned dead away.

When she regained consciousness a faint glow of light met her eyes as the lids feebly lifted themselves from their torpor.  Gradually there came to her nostrils a dank, musty odor and then the smell of tobacco smoke.  She was lying on her back, and her eyes at last began to take in broad rafters and cobwebby timbers not far above her head.  The light was so dim that shadows and not real objects seemed to constitute the surroundings.  Then there grew the certainty that she was not alone in this dismal place.  Turning her head slightly, she was able, with some effort, to distinguish the figure of a man seated on the opposite side of the low, square room, his back against the wall, his legs outstretched.  At his elbow, on a box, burned a candle, flickering and feeble in its worthlessness.  He was smoking a pipe, and there was about him an air of contentment and security.

Slowly past events crowded themselves into the path of memory, and her brain took them up as if they were parts of a dream.  For many minutes she was perfectly quiet, dumbly contemplating the stranger who sat guard over her in that wretched place.  In her mind there was quickly developed, as one brings the picture from the film of a negative the truth of the situation.  She had escaped from one set of captors only to give herself into the clutches of others a thousand times more detestable, infinitely more evil-hearted.