Now my heart would so beat that it sickened me, of sheer terror that I should be found; and this especially when a man would stay for a while talking on the stairs within an arm's length of where I lay: now it was as I might say, more of the intellect; and I pondered on what I heard my Cousin Tom say, and marvelled at his shrewdness; for fear, if it does not drive away wits, sharpens them wonderfully.

He had, of course, put me in greater peril, by saying that I was gone to Rome; but he had saved himself very adroitly, for no witness in the house could tell that I had not done so; for here was my chamber empty, and I and my man and my clothes and my books and my horses all vanished away.

At one time, then, I was all eyes and ears in the muffled dark, hearing my heart thump as it had been another's; at another time I would be looking within and contemplating my own fear.
Again and again, however, I thought of my Cousin Dorothy and wondered where she was and what she was at.

I had not heard her voice all that time; and, on a sudden, after the men had been in the house near an hour I should say, I heard her sob suddenly, close to me, in a terrified kind of voice.
"Keep them, Nancy, keep them here as long as you can.

It will give him--" "Eh ?" said a man's voice suddenly beneath.