Now on returning to my cell, I experienced a great gladness and uplifting of heart, for that God had graciously given me power to witness a true confession, so that I was constrained to lift up my voice in praise to Him, singing one of David’s psalms, until the _alcaide_ came with small patience to my door, and roughly told me that if I did not cease my singing, I should receive two hundred lashes. But although they might stop my mouth, yet could not they hinder me from making melody in my heart, so that I can truly say, that had the summons to the torture-chamber come that night, I had gone to the rack, yea, even to the stake itself, with as great constancy and as firm a heart as any of those blessed martyrs of whom we read. In this happy posture of mind I remained for some days, being so enwrapt in holy joy and confidence that I hailed every step in the passage as perchance that of one who might be sent to summon me to glorify God in the torment, and leaped up to meet the turnkey on his entrance. But the summons did not come, and I returned by degrees unto my old ways, yet with a mind not so settled and a humour more melancholic than before. For there come to me in the night visions of the old house at Ellswether, and my father sitting in his great chair in the hall, and on the threshold little Dorothy watching for tidings of me, and wondering and grieving because none came. And the devil was not sparing of evil suggestions--viz., that I should purchase lasting ease and freedom by a seeming compliance, such as need not bind me in the future, and must needs be far better than to die unknown a shameful death, while those at home should never guess what had befell me. Night after night was I tormented with these evil dreams, engendered in great part, as I have no doubt, by the closeness of the place and the extreme desire I had to go abroad in the air, which not happening, I lacked at last even strength to perform the tasks I had set myself in the daytime. And when, after some three or four months, the Inquisidors summoned me again before them, so broken and weary was I that it had given me little pain to have gone straight to death instead.