That about ended my discomfort. She called her guards and torches, and we went down into the dungeons. These were down under the castle’s foundations, and mainly were small cells hollowed out of the living rock. Some of these cells had no light at all. In one of them was a woman, in foul rags, who sat on the ground, and would not answer a question or speak a word, but only looked up at us once or twice, through a cobweb of tangled hair, as if to see what casual thing it might be that was disturbing with sound and light the meaningless dull dream that was become her life; after that, she sat bowed, with her dirt-caked fingers idly interlocked in her lap, and gave no further sign.

This poor rack of bones was a woman of middle age, apparently; but only apparently; she had been there nine years, and was eighteen when