I will go nearer the door." He hoped to escape them; he had some hope even of escaping from the room and giving the alarm.

But when he had forced his way to the threshold, he found it guarded by two pikemen; and glancing back to see if his movements were observed--for he knew that his agitation might have awakened suspicion--he found that the taller of the two whom he had left, the black-garbed man with the hungry face, was watching him a-tiptoe, over the shoulders of the crowd.
With that, and the sense of his impotence, the lights began to swim before his eyes.

The catastrophe that overhung his party, the fate so treacherously prepared for all whom he loved and all with whom his fortunes were bound up, confused his brain almost to delirium.

He strove to think, to calculate chances, to imagine some way in which he might escape from the room, or from a window might cry the alarm.

But he could not bring his mind to a point.