Master Clement first demurred, then, though without alacrity, acquiesced. “Is it well for you to be alone with him? I tell you the Devil hath such wiles—But since you wish it, I will go—I will go for a short while.” He heaved his slight, black figure from the chair, and, moving stiffly, quitted the room. The gaoler stood yet at the door, but, at a sign from Carthew, without, not within, the room. The squire’s brother had his own strength. It exhibited itself now. He stilled his hurried breathing, ceased the nervous motion of his hands, indefinably broadened and heightened his frame, and became the strong, Puritan country gentleman, the future officer of Ironsides. Whatever there was in him of stanch and firm and good so struggled with what was darkly passionate that, for these minutes at least, there rose on the horizon something that was not the tempest-tossed ship of many months. The masts seemed to cease to bend, the anchor to hold again. He stood within five feet of Aderhold. He had moved so that the table was no longer between them. In doing so, the attitude of advantage and mastership had been lost. The two stood on a level floor, with no conventional judgement bar between them. If in Carthew, beneath murk and tempest, there appeared for the moment something basic, justified, and ultimate, in Aderhold no less character unveiled its mass. He stood in chains, but they seemed ribbons of mist. It was he that was metal and real, and with a sudden loom and resistive force sent back, broken, doubts and fantastic violences of thought and ascription. Though for a short time only, yet for that time, the tattered farrago of superstitions, hanging in Carthew’s mind like mouldering banners of wars whose very reason was forgot, shrunk and shrivelled until they seemed but featureless dust. For a time he ceased, standing here, to believe in Aderhold’s attendance at sabbats, brewings of poison from baleful herbs, toads, spiders, and newts, and midnight conspirings in the interests of the Kingdom of Satan. Even the acknowledged, monstrous sin, the extravagant, the unpardonable, the monarch and includer of all—even the enormity of Unbelief—wavered in his mind, grew unsubstantial. There was a fact of great force before him, a mass, a reality.... But if, for one larger, saner moment, he rejected belief in a supernatural bond of evil linking together Aderhold and Joan Heron, he by no means did this with the possibility of other bonds—evil also if they existed between these two—evil to him as wormwood, darkness, and madness! “In particular,” he said, in a voice that thickened as he went on, “I am told that they have taken Joan Heron. I had never thought of that—of her coming under suspicion.... I had never thought of that. I do not yet believe her to be a witch—though indeed they bring all manner of accusation and proof against her—but I will not yet believe it.... But I will have from thee what has been thy power over her! Tell me that, thou atheist!”