It was with a different—oh, a different, different tone that they questioned Master Harry Carthew and harkened solicitously to what he had to tell. All the crowded place leaned forward and listened, in the hot, slanted gold of the fourth afternoon.... Joan saw them all, and saw into their minds prone before the foreknown truth of whatever Master Carthew was about to recount. She sat like carven marble and viewed and knew the world she viewed. She saw Alison and Cecily, Will and his mother, Goodman Cole, the forester’s wife, Lukin the carter, the tinker, many others. She saw Master Clement and all the clergy and gentry of the commission, the court, the spectators. She saw the Witch Judge who was going to hang her. And townspeople with whom she had had acquaintance.... The vintner who had wished to marry her was here, pale and of a tremendous inward thankfulness. And servants from the castle, and the new huntsman.... All here to see her hunted—her and the others. She felt their tongues go over their lips, and the warm indrawing of their shoulders and nursing of their elbows—felt and cared not. Carthew was speaking in a hollow, short, determined voice. If a black lava torrent of passion and madness was devastating his soul, few enough knew it of all in that thronged place.... At no previous time had there been such soundlessness in the hall, such keyed and strained attention. Hawthorn, at least, believed that Master Harry Carthew was to be a great man in England, was to climb high, with the Bible in his hand. For the town, that was of another cast of opinion,—if it conceived of him hardly so highly, if it shrugged its shoulders and waxed bitter over these mounting Puritans, yet it felt in its heart that they were mounting and gave to their personal qualities an uneasy recognition. It, too, marked Harry Carthew for a coming man—though it might not hold with Hawthorn that the fact of Satan’s striking through the sorcerer’s hand at this life marked a recognition on Satan’s part of qualities the most dangerous to his sovereignty. And Carthew was young, and, though yet gaunt and pale and hardly recovered from that felon blow, of a manly form and a well-looking face. All through the long trial he had sat there so evidently poisoned and suffering—urged now by his brother and now by others to leave and take his rest, yet never going—sitting there with his eyes upon this murdering wizard.... The throng was ready to make him into the hero, the visible St. George—standing there now with his spear lifted to give the one last, needed blow.... There was the dragon, there! the pale leech and all the wretches with him, and dim and horrible behind him all his train of evil works, and Satan horned and hoofed, spreading enormous bat wings, making the very hall brown and dusky! Full beside the leech, in all minds now, stood that most vile witch Joan Heron.