Presently they entered the large hall, but on its threshold were ordered to pause while way was made for them.

Cicely never forgot the sight of it as it appeared that day.

The lofty, arched roof of rich chestnut-wood, set there hundreds of years before by hands that spared neither work nor timber, amongst the beams of which the bright light of morning played so clearly that she could see the spiders' webs, and in one of them a sleepy autumn wasp caught fast.

The mob of people gathered to watch her public trial--faces, many of them, that she had known from childhood.
How they stared at her as she stood there by the head of the steps, her sleeping child held in her arms! They were a packed audience and had been prepared to condemn her--that she could see and hear, for did not some of them point and frown, and set up a cry of "Witch!" as they had been told to do?
But it died away.

The sight of her, the daughter of one of their great men and the widow of another, standing in her innocent beauty, the slumbering babe upon her breast, seemed to quell them, till the hardest faces grew pitiful--full of resentment, too, some of them, but not against her.
Then the three judges on the bench behind the table, at which sat the monkish secretaries; the hard-faced, hook-nosed "Old Bishop" in his gorgeous robes and mitre, his crozier resting against the panelling behind him, peering about him with beady eyes.