f hay in the
corner; an ancient pitch-fork; the heads of his guards outside the
little barred window; the sound of their voices talking. Later, when a
man had come out from the house, and looked in at his door, telling him
that they must start in ten minutes, and giving him a hunch of bread to
eat, it had been the way the man's eyebrows grew over his nose, and the
creases of his felt hat, to which he gave his mind. Somewhere, far
beneath in himself, he knew that there were other considerations and
memories and movements, that were even fears and hopes and desires; but
he could not come at these; he was as a man struggling to dive, held up
on the surface by sheets of cork. He knew that his father was in that
house; that it was his father who had been the means of taking him; that
Marjorie was there--yet these facts were as tales read in a book. So,
too, with his faith; his lips repeated words now and then; but God was
as far from him and as inconceivably unreal, as is the thought of
sunshine and a garden to a miner freezing painlessly in the dark....

In the same state he was led out again presently, and set on a horse.
And while a man attached one foot to the other by a cord beneath the
horse's belly, he looked like a child at the arched doorway of the
house; at a patch of lichen that was beginning to spread above the
lintel; at the open window of the room above.

He vaguely desired to speak with Marjorie again; he even asked the man
who was tying his feet whether he might do so; but he got no answer. A
group of men watched him from the door, and he noticed that they were
silent. He wondered if it were the tying of his feet in which they were
so much absorbed.

* * * * *

Little by little, as they rode, this oppression began to lift. Half a
dozen times he determined to speak with the man who rode beside him and
held his horse by a leading rein; and each time he did not speak.
Neither did any man speak to him. Another man rode behind; and a dozen
or so went on foot. He could hear them talking together in low voices.

He was finally roused by his companion's speaking. He had noticed the
man look at him now and again strangely and not unkindly.

"Is it true that you are a son of Mr. Audrey, sir?"

He was on the point of saying "Yes," when his mind seemed to come back
to him as clear as an awakening from sleep. He understood that he must
not identify himself if he could help it. He had