"Frank is no more dead than I am. I'd lay my life upon it. Stephen Radcliffe has got him shut up in the tower; and the piteous cries are his--crying for release." "Bless my heart and mind!" exclaimed Duffham, backing right against the big scales. "Frank Radcliffe alive and shut up in the tower! But there's no way to the tower. He could not be got into it." "I don't care. I know he is there. That huzzy, now gone out, does well to say no cries were abroad last night; her business is to throw people off the scent. But I tell you, Duffham, the cries never were so loud or so piteous, and I heard what they said as distinctly as you can hear me speak now. 'Help! Frank Radcliffe! Help!' they said. And I swear the voice was Frank's own." "If ever I heard the like of this!" ejaculated Duffham. "It is really not--not to be credited." "The sound of the cries comes out on the air through the openings in the tower," ran on Tod, in excitement. "Oh, he is there, poor fellow, safe enough. And to think what long months he has been kept there, Stephen's prisoner! Twelve. Twelve, as I'm alive. Now, look you here, Duffham! you are staring like an unbeliever." "It's not altogether that--that I don't believe," said Duffham, whose wide-open eyes were staring considerably. "I am thinking what is to be done about it--how to set the question at rest." Tod left the door unguarded and flung himself into the other chair. He went over the whole narrative quietly: how Mrs. Frank Radcliffe--who had been listening to the cries for a week past--had first put him into a puzzle, how he had then heard the words and the voice, and how the true explanation came flashing into his mind later. With every sentence, Duffham grew more convinced, and at last he believed it as much as we did. "And now how is he to be got out?" concluded Tod. Holding a council together, we decided that the first step must be to get a magistrate's order to search the Torr. That involved the disclosure of the facts to the magistrate--whosoever he might be. Mr. Brandon was pitched upon: Duffham proposed the Squire at first; but, as Tod pointed out, the Squire would be sure to go to work in some hot and headlong manner, and perhaps ruin all. Let Stephen Radcliffe get only half an inkling of what was up, and he might contrive to convey Frank to the ends of the earth.