“Put him——” and there were other words that came to me, but so indistinctly that I could not make them out at all; nay, I could not tell, being in a stupor, whether I was awake or did only dream.
Then I was taken up and carried along—up steps and steps which appeared to be without end, and at last was thrown upon a wooden floor. A door was shut and bolted and barred; and thereafter a sound of retreating footsteps dying away, and I was left alone. I was wide awake now, for my body was one great, almost insupportable pain.
And terrible as was the anguish of my frame, that of my mind was more; but first came the racking of the bones and the torture of the flesh, and these, in their turn, brought consciousness and memory, and an indescribable agony of the soul.
I tried to move—a thing well-nigh impossible to me, trussed up as I was, and by reason also of the pain I suffered; and I was constrained to abandon the attempt. I should have borne up better perhaps if my eyes had been open and my tongue free; but there I lay in the darkness, like one already dead, and had nearly given way to despair.
And as the shadows and mists of stupor cleared away from my mind, I was overwhelmed at the extent of the disaster which had befallen me, for I saw in it but too surely an indication of some dreadful evil, some fearful calamity which had overtaken my mistress and her fortunes, and that, too, at the hands of Desmond.
And I was powerless to help her! I had allowed myself to be caught—running, blind fool that I was, my own head into the noose.
Where was she?
Where was Eva?
What had happened?