The eye at the window was the hunchback's, who was perched upon the top of a boulder, which he had rolled to the side of the building for the purpose of enabling him to see within. His attitude was as that of a spider awaiting its victim, and betrayed his anticipation of a pleasurable event to come. If Sir James could have witnessed his brother's unaccountable demeanor, he would doubtless have been convinced of the truth of a rumor that was commonly traded among his men to the effect that Zenas was of unsound mind, and a menace to his ambitious plans. The tottering of Zenas's reason was directly due to the circumstance of his having been Sir James's intimate confederate in one of the most brilliant and daring conspiracies in a time when conspiracies were among the chief products of England's soil. The plot in question had been conceived in Tyrrell's brain at the time when he had been commissioned by Richard III to make away with his two nephews in the room in which they were then imprisoned in the Tower; and involved the secret transportation of the young princes to a place of safety till such time as a sufficiently armed force could be gathered to set the older of the two upon the throne. That one of the boy dukes was actually murdered and only one so transported, Sir James attributed to the egregious blunder or willful defection of one Dighton, his groom, who was bribed handsomely by Tyrrell to assist him in his gigantic enterprise. Dighton had suffered a summary death as the penalty of his fault. Zenas, garbed in the habit of a Sister of the Faith, had received into his charge in one of the by-ways of London a fair-haired young girl, who was the escaped prince in disguise. Together they had traveled from hamlet to hamlet till they had come to the haven of refuge prepared for them in Scotland. From whence he had been so indiscreet as to return to England and hint, while in his cups, of the incubation of a vast uprising in the North, in consequence of which he had been seized, thrown into the torture chamber, and released only after he had been blinded in one eye and reduced to a repulsive caricature of his former self. While he had incurred Sir James's stern displeasure because of his indiscretion, he had also won his highest regard and confidence because of his stubborn refusal to divulge a single secret through the whole of his agonized sufferings.