"What, indeed?" Ralph said quietly. "I cannot see, but I can feel what she is to all of you. Good-night, father, and thank you."
Ravenspur strode off with a not unkindly nod. As a matter of fact, he was more moved by the return of the wanderer and his evident sufferings and misfortunes than he cared to confess. He brooded over these strange things till at length he lapsed into troubled and uneasy slumber.
The intense gripping silence deepened. Ralph Ravenspur still sat in the ingle with his face bent upon the glowing logs as if he could see, and as if he was seeking for some inspiration in the sparkling crocus flame.
Then without making the slightest noise, he crept across the hall, feeling his way along with his finger-tips to the landing above.
He had made no idle boast. He knew every inch of the castle. Like a cat he crept to his own room, and there, merely discarding his coat and boots, he took a blanket from the bed.
Into the corridor he stepped and then, lying down under the hangings of Cordova leather, wrapped himself up cocoon fashion in his blanket and dropped into a sound sleep. The mournful silence brooded, the rats scratched behind the oaken paneled walls.
Then out of the throat of the darkness came a stifled cry. It was the fighting rattle made by the strong man suddenly deprived of the power to breathe.
Again it came, and this time more loudly, with a ring of despair in it. In the dead silence it seemed to fill the whole house, but the walls were thick, and beyond the corridor there was no cognizance of anything being in the least wrong.
But the man in the blanket against the arras heard it and struggled to his feet. A long period of vivid personal danger had sharpened his senses. His knowledge of woodcraft enabled him to locate the cry to a yard.