death upon the rack.

IV

It was a sleepy-eyed young man that came into the kitchen early next
morning, where the ladies and the maids were hard at work all together
upon the business of baking. The baking was a considerable task each
week, for there were not less than twenty mouths, all told, to feed in
the hall day by day, including a widow or two that called each day for
rations; and a great part, therefore, of a mistress's time in such
houses was taken up with such things.

Marjorie turned to him, with her arms floured to the elbow.

"Well?" she said, smiling.

"I have done, mistress. Will it please you to see it before I go and
sleep?"

They had examined the house carefully last night, measuring and sounding
in the deep and thin walls alike, for there was at present no
convenience at all for a hunted man. Owen had obtained her consent to
two or three alternative proposals, and she had then left him to
himself. From her bed, that she had had prepared, with Alice
Babington's, in a loft--turning out for the night the farm-men who had
usually slept there, she had heard more than once the sound of distant
hammering from the main front of the house where her own room lay, that
had been once her mother's as well.

The possibilities in this little manor were small. To construct a
passage, giving an exterior escape, as had been made in some houses,
would have meant here a labour of weeks, and she had told the young man
she would be content with a simple hiding-hole. Yet, although she did
not expect great things, and knew, moreover, the kind of place that he
would make, she was as excited as a child, in a grave sort of way, at
what she would see.

He took her first into the parlour, where years ago Robin had talked
with her in the wintry sunshine. The open chimney was on the right as
they entered, and though she knew that somewhere on that same side would
be one of the two entrances that had been arranged, all the difference
she could see was that a piece of the wall-hanging that had been between
the window and the fire was gone, and that there hung in its place an
old picture painted on a panel. She looked at this without speaking: the
wall was wainscoted in oak, as it had always been, six feet up from the
floor. Then an idea came to her: she tilted the picture on one side. But
there was no more to be seen than a cracked panel, which, it seemed to
her, had once been nearer the door. She rapped upon this, but it