Shop after shop, and booth on booth, until Nick wondered where the gardens were; and such a maze of lanes, byways, courts, blind alleys, and passages that his simple country footpath head went all into a tangle, and he could scarcely have told Tottenham Court road from the river Thames. All that he remembered afterward was that, turning from High Holborn into the Farringdon road, he saw a great church, under Ludgate Hill, with spire burned and fallen, and its massive tower, black with age and smoke, staring on the town. But he was too confused to know whither they went or what he saw in passing; for of such a forest of houses he had never even dreamed, with people swarming everywhere like ants upon a hill, and among them all not one kind face he knew. Through the spirit of adventure that had roused him for a time welled up a great heart-sickness for his mother and his home. Out of a bewildered daze he came at last to realize this much: that the master-player’s house was very tall and very dark, standing in a dismal, dirty street, and that it had a gloomy hallway full of shadows that crept and wavered along the wall in the dim light of the late afternoon. Then the master-player pushed him up a narrow staircase and along a black corridor to a door at the end of the passage, through which he thrust him into a darkness like night, and slammed the door behind him. Nick heard the bolts shoot heavily, and Master Carew call through the heavy panels: “Now, Jackanapes, sit down and chew the cud of solitude awhile. It may cool thy silly pate for thee, since nothing else will serve. When thou hast found thy common sense, perchance thou’lt find thy freedom, not before.” Then his step went down the corridor, down the stair, through the long hall—a door banged with a hollow sound that echoed through the house, and all was still. At first, in the utter darkness, Nick could not see at all, and did not move for fear of falling down some awful hole; but as his eyes grew used to the gloom he saw that he was in a little room. The only window was boarded up, but a dim light crept in through narrow cracks and made faint bars across the air. Little motes floated up and down these thin blue bars, wavering in the uncertain light and then lost in the darkness. Upon the floor was a pallet of straw, covered with a coarse sheet, and having a rough coverlet of sheepskin. A round log was the only pillow. Something moved. Nick, startled, peered into the shadows: it was a strip of ragged tapestry which fluttered on the wall. As he watched it flapping fitfully there came a hollow rattle in the wainscot, and an uncanny sound like the moaning of wind in the chimney.