And as he stood there, leaning against a fence, in a brown study, it seemed to him as if he heard from the midst of the village the very hymn which he had sung so often with his darling before their evening repose: "The Lord, my God, I praise and bless." He listened attentively. It was no delusion. They were really the words of the hymn, the child's voice was really singing them. At first he fancied that his darling was in some other world, and was speaking to him from the Kingdom of Heaven, and he lifted up his voice likewise, and sang back again, his deep sonorous voice sounding like a magnified echo of the bell-like childish voice. Subsequently, however, it occurred to him that perhaps the child was locked up somewhere, and wanted to let him know where she was by singing the hymn. Suddenly there arose a hideous shout from the courtyard of the castle, the inarticulate roar of hundreds and hundreds of savage men, whose very throats seemed to thirst for blood. At that same instant Hétfalusy had surrendered his arms to his assailants. Peter Zudár lost not another instant in reflection, but turned up his shirt-sleeves, smoothed away his hair from his eyes, and rushed towards the castle. A long lane separated him from the residential part of the mansion, but not choosing to follow it along its whole length, he waited till he saw the pinnacles of the castle, and then took a short cut over hedge and ditch, dashing along straight before him heedless of everything. * * * * * The infuriated mob which, after being cowed by the mere show of resistance, became all the more brutal at the first symptom of surrender, after Hétfalusy had laid down his arms, was able to glut its brutal rage, at will, on the old gentleman who had thus become its victim. But it was lost labour. What satisfaction can there be in the torturing of a withered stump which is dumb to all outrage?--it is as fruitless a business as flogging a corpse! The old squire did not demean himself by a single outcry of pain. When they wanted him to confess that the gentry had banded together to extirpate the peasantry, he coldly replied: "That is not true." Every denial on his part was followed by inhuman tortures. But they were but tormenting a frigid skeleton insensible to pain, who only replied, again and again: "That is not true!" The invading mob, after breaking everything in the castle it could lay its hands upon, began searching for young Széphalmi and the doctor. They must have hidden well, for nowhere could they be found. The mob turned all the rooms upside down, and yet it could not find them. The old man must certainly know where they were stowed away. But Hétfalusy would not betray his son-in-law or the doctor. Amongst his executioners shaggy Hanák particularly distinguished himself by his fiendish ingenuity, but the squire only remarked to him in a gentle voice: