The young husband had interfered at that point, believing the bride's life in danger, and had flung the noble out into the midst of the humble and trembling wedding guests, in the parlor, and left him there astonished at this strange treatment, and implacably embittered against both bride and groom.

The said lord being cramped for dungeon-room had asked the queen to accommodate his two criminals, and here in her bastile they had been ever since; hither, indeed, they had come before their crime was an hour old, and had never seen each other since.

Here they were, kenneled like toads in the same rock; they had passed nine pitch dark years within fifty feet of each other, yet neither knew whether the other was alive or not.
All the first years, their only question had been--asked with beseechings and tears that might have moved stones, in time, perhaps, but hearts are not stones: "Is he alive ?" "Is she alive ?" But they had never got an answer; and at last that question was not asked any more--or any other.
I wanted to see the man, after hearing all this.

He was thirty-four years old, and looked sixty.

He sat upon a squared block of stone, with his head bent down, his forearms resting on his knees, his long hair hanging like a fringe before his face, and he was muttering to himself.