This gaoler was a battered, sometime soldier, red-faced and wry-mouthed. What romance had been in his life appeared to have come to him with the dykes and green levels and waters of the Low Countries. Chance leading him one day to the discovery that his prisoner knew Zutphen, Utrecht, and Amsterdam, he had henceforth, at each visit, plunged back for one short moment into the good old wars and renewed a lurid happiness. The reflex, striking upon Aderhold, lightened his lot as prisoner. The gaoler, after the first few days, exhibited toward him no personal brutality. Once he made, unexpectedly, the remark that he had seen good fighting done by all manner of people, and that the Devil must have some virtue in order to make so good a stand. But the gaoler’s visits were of the briefest, and he was close-mouthed as to all things save the wars. If he knew when assizes would be, he chose not to impart it. One day only he had been communicative enough to speak of the commission named by the Privy Council. Who were the commissioners? He named the members from this side of the county—two or three of the clergy, several considerable country gentlemen. From the Hawthorn end Squire Carthew and his brother and Master Clement the minister. It had been at work, the commission, meeting and meeting and taking people up. The matter was become a big matter, making a noise through the country. They said the King himself was interested. A bishop was coming—and the Witch Judge. “The Witch Judge?” “Aye, the Witch Judge.” But the gaoler would say no more—Aderhold was not sure that he knew much more. He left the cell, and at no other visit would he speak of anything but the Dutch and the good wars.... What he had said had left a sharp thorn of anxiety,—not for the prisoner’s self. Aderhold knew perfectly well how palely hope gleamed upon Gilbert Aderhold. He would be done to death. But he knew also, from much observation, how they dragged the net so as to take in unallied forms. He tried to think of any at Hawthorn or thereabouts who might be endangered. He had been intimate with no one; none there had been confidant or disciple. How many that could save he had had occasion to note in France and Italy. Speech with such an one, acts of mere neighbourliness, the sheerest accidental crossing of paths—anything served for prosecution and ruin.... In the lack of all knowledge he was chiefly anxious about old Dorothy and the boy her nephew, and the youth to whom he had given books. He never thought of Joan as being in peril.