The state in which I crawled back to the house after this encounter maybe conceived but not described. From an exaltation of mind to which the epithet delirious might be applied with propriety, I fell in an instant to a depth of abjectness as monstrous as my late felicity, but more real and reasonable. All the things, on my escape from which I had been congratulating myself, now lay before me, and formed a vista as gloomy as the point to which it tended was dreadful. To be a slave to the woman and man who had ruined my youth; to live outwardly at ease, while inwardly devoured by daily and hourly terror; to hang between the choice of danger or baseness, comfort or treachery; to discern in my own destruction or my patron's the inevitable ending; beyond all, to foresee that I should choose the evil and eschew the good, and to wish it otherwise and be powerless to change it--these things, and particularly the last, filled me with anticipations of misery so great that I rolled on my bed, and cursed Providence and my fate; and next day went down so pale, and ill, and woe-begone that the servants took note of it. "Pheugh, Mr. Price," said Martin, "you might be Charnock himself, or Keyes, poor devil! You could not look more like hanging! What is it?" I muttered that I was not well. "It is Keyes I am sorry for," continued the steward, who was taking his morning draught, "if so be they go to the end with him. I have heard of a master given up by his servant, but never before of a servant hung on his master's evidence--and his master the one that drew him into it! Hang Captain Porter, say I! A fine Captain!" "Oh, they will let the poor devil live," said another. "Keyes?" "Ay." "Not they!" said Mr. Martin with great appearance of wisdom. "He was in the Blues, do you see, my man, and if it spread there? No, he will swing. He will swing for the example. Don't you think so, Mr. Price? You are in there with my lord, and should know." But I muttered something and escaped, finding solitude and my own reflections as tolerable as their gossip. A little later, my lord, sending for me, kept me close at work until evening; which was so far fortunate, as the employment, by diverting my thoughts, helped to lift me out of the panic into which I had fallen. True, the news that the three conspirators were found guilty and were to die the following Monday, exactly as Smith had foretold, threw me again into the cold fit, and heralded another night of misery. But as it is not possible for mortals to lie long under the same peril without the sense of danger losing its edge, in three days I began to find life bearable. The stateliness of the household, the silence and books that surrounded me, the regular hours and steady employment soothed my nerves; and Smith making no sign, and nothing occurring to indicate that he meant to keep his word or summon me to fulfil mine, I lulled myself into the belief that all was a dream.