For never since the night he was arrested had he dared to dream that he would leave Liége alive. His attempted escape from the city with Sylvia, his passing under the false guise of two different Frenchmen--the necessity for which he had always loathed, while understanding that in this way alone could he reach her--the testimony that Francbois would surely give against him, and the imputed murder of a man in the pay and service of France, must overwhelm and confound him. Thinking still of the woman he had learnt to love so dearly, he let his eyes roam over that gloomy, solemn hall and observe all that it contained while heeding little. He saw the officers of his country's immemorial foe conversing together ere they should begin to question him. He saw, too, the ancient arms that hung all round the walls--pikes, swords, maces, and halbards, musketoons and muskets; also, he saw far down at the other end another man who was, undoubtedly, like himself, a prisoner. A man guarded by more soldiers and with his hands chained together; one whose face was bruised and raw, as though, in his capture, he had been badly wounded; one who, leaning forward with that face resting on his hands, and his eyes upon the ground, presented an appearance of brutish indifference to his surroundings as well as to his almost certain fate. "The witness who will be produced before you, and the prisoner's own actions, will give you the matter," De Violaine said now, addressing the other members of the court, "upon which you have to form a conclusion. The witness is the traitor, Francbois, whom you condemned yesterday. What he knows he must tell in spite of his condemnation, or means will be used to make him do so," and he glanced towards a man leaning behind one of the great stone columns that, at regular distances, supported the heavily-traced and groined roof. For there was still another man within that hall, one on whom Bevill's eyes had not yet lighted--a man, old and grizzled, yet strong and burly and roughly clad--a man who stood by a strange-looking instrument that lay along the floor and was a complicated mass of rollers and cords and pulleys--a thing that was, in truth, the rack. Near this there stood, also, four or five great copper pots, each holding several gallons of water, and having great ladles of the same metal in each. These things stood here close to the rack and that dark, forbidding man because, as all of that Court knew well, when the rack failed to elicit the truth from prisoner or suspected witness, the _question à l'eau_--namely, the pouring of quart after quart of water down the throats of the wretched victims, never failed in its effect. "Let us hear the man," an officer who was in command of the Regiment de Montemar said. "If he endeavours to lie or to deceive us the----" and he glanced towards the executioner as he leant against the column.