When Dorothy entered she found herself in a large place, the form of which she could ill distinguish in the dull light proceeding from the chinks about the closed doors of a huge furnace.  The air was filled with gurglings and strange low groanings, as of some creature in dire pain.  Dorothy had as good nerves as ever woman, yet she could not help some fright as she stood alone by the door and stared into the gloomy twilight into which her companion had advanced.  As her eyes became used to the ruddy dusk, she could see better, but everywhere they lighted on shapes inexplicable, whose forms to the first questioning thought suggested instruments of torture; but cruel as some of them looked, they were almost too strange, contorted, fantastical for such.  Still, the wood-cuts in a certain book she had been familiar with in childhood, commonly called Fox’s Book of Martyrs, kept haunting her mind’s eye—­and were they not Papists into whose hands she had fallen? she said to herself, amused at the vagaries of her own involuntary suggestions.

Among the rest, one thing specially caught her attention, both from its size and its complicated strangeness.  It was a huge wheel standing near the wall, supported between two strong uprights—­some twelve or fifteen feet in diameter, with about fifty spokes, from every one of which hung a large weight.  Its grotesque and threatful character was greatly increased by the mingling of its one substance with its many shadows on the wall behind it.  So intent was she upon it that she started when lady Margaret spoke.

‘Why, mistress Dorothy!’ she said, ’you look as if you had wandered into St. Anthony’s cave!  Here is my lord Herbert to welcome his cousin.’

Beside her stood a man rather under the middle stature, but as his back was to the furnace this was about all Dorothy could discover of his appearance, save that he was in the garb of a workman, with bare head and arms, and held in his hand a long iron rod ending in a hook.

‘Welcome, indeed, cousin Vaughan!’ he said heartily, but without offering his hand, which in truth, although an honest, skilful, and well-fashioned hand, was at the present moment far from fit for a lady’s touch.

There was something in his voice not altogether strange to Dorothy, but she could not tell of whom or what it reminded her.

‘Are you come to take another lesson on the cross-bow?’ he asked with a smile.

Then she knew he was the same she had met in the looped chamber beside the arblast.  An occasional slight halt, not impediment, in his speech, was what had remained on her memory.  Did he always dwell only in the dusky borders of the light?

Dorothy uttered a little ‘Oh!’ of surprise, but immediately recovering herself, said,

’I am sorry I did not know it was you, my lord.  I might by this time have been capable of discharging bolt or arrow with good aim in defence of the castle.’