to the bell.
When the butler would have lit his master's candle, however, he was
forbidden. The latter was not going to retire. "I have many pamphlets to
finish," said he to Catherine, "before I can close my eyes, and perhaps
may be poring over the affairs of the nation for hours after you are
asleep. Can either of us be more meetly employed? My eyes will be
blinding for the good of others, and yours preparing by rest for future
mischief."

But neither the business alleged, nor the magnificent compliment,
could win Catherine from thinking that some very different object must
occasion so serious a delay of proper repose. To be kept up for hours,
after the family were in bed, by stupid pamphlets was not very likely.
There must be some deeper cause: something was to be done which could
be done only while the household slept; and the probability that Mrs.
Tilney yet lived, shut up for causes unknown, and receiving from the
pitiless hands of her husband a nightly supply of coarse food, was the
conclusion which necessarily followed. Shocking as was the idea, it
was at least better than a death unfairly hastened, as, in the natural
course of things, she must ere long be released. The suddenness of her
reputed illness, the absence of her daughter, and probably of her other
children, at the time--all favoured the supposition of her imprisonment.
Its origin--jealousy perhaps, or wanton cruelty--was yet to be
unravelled.

In revolving these matters, while she undressed, it suddenly struck her
as not unlikely that she might that morning have passed near the very
spot of this unfortunate woman's confinement--might have been within
a few paces of the cell in which she languished out her days; for what
part of the abbey could be more fitted for the purpose than that which
yet bore the traces of monastic division? In the high-arched passage,
paved with stone, which already she had trodden with peculiar awe, she
well remembered the doors of which the general had given no account. To
what might not those doors lead? In support of the plausibility of this
conjecture, it further occurred to her that the forbidden gallery, in
which lay the apartments of the unfortunate Mrs. Tilney, must be, as
certainly as her memory could guide her, exactly over this suspected
range of cells, and the staircase by the side of those apartments of
which she had caught a transient glimpse, communicating by some
secret means with those cells, might well have