The thought of it grew in misery faster than the thing itself.  The greater torment lies always in the foreboding.  She felt almost as if she were buried alive.  Having their hands tied even, is enough to drive strong men almost crazy.  Nor, firm of heart as she was, did no evils of a more undefined and less resistible character claim a share in her fast-rising apprehensions; she began to discover that she too was assailable by the terror of the night, although she had not hitherto been aware of it, no one knowing what may lie unhatched in his mind, waiting the concurrence of vital conditions.

But Dorothy was better able to bear up under such assaults than thousands who believe nothing of many a hideous marvel commonly accepted in her day; and anyhow the unavoidable must be encountered, if not with indifference, yet with what courage may be found responsive to the call of the will.  So, with all her energy, a larger store than she knew, she braced herself to endure.  As to any attempt to make herself heard, she knew from the first that was of doubtful result, and now must certainly be of no avail when all but the warders were asleep.  But to spend the night thus was a far less evil than to be discovered by the staring domestics, and exposed to the open merriment of her friends, and the hidden mockery of her enemies.  As to Caspar, she was certain of his silence.  So she sat on, like the lady in Comus, ‘in stony fetters fixed and motionless;’ only, as she said to herself, there was no attendant spirit to summon Caspar, who alone could take the part of Sabrina, and ’unlock the clasping charm.’  Little did Dorothy think, as in her dreary imprisonment she recalled that marvellous embodiment of unified strength and tenderness, as yet unacknowledged of its author, that it was the work of the same detestable fanatic who wrote those appalling ‘Animadversions, &c.’

She grew chilly and cramped.  The night passed very slowly.  She dozed and woke, and dozed again.  At last, from very weariness of both soul and body, she fell into a troubled sleep, from which she woke suddenly with the sound in her ears of voices whispering.  The confidence of lord Herbert, both in the evil renown of his wizard cave and the character of his father’s household, seemed mistaken.  Still the subdued manner of their conversation appeared to indicate it was not without some awe that the speakers, whoever they were, had ventured within the forbidden precincts; their whispers, indeed, were so low that she could not say of either voice whether it belonged to man or woman.  Her first idea was to deliver herself from the unpleasantness of her enforced espial by the utterance of some frightful cry such as would at the same time punish with the pains of terror their fool-hardy intrusion.  But the spur of the moment was seldom indeed so sharp with Dorothy as to drive her to act without reflection, and a moment showed her that such persons being in the marquis’s household as would meet in the middle of the night,