The blaze had ceased to be visible when they came to the last descent towards the village. Far and wide the alarm had spread; consternation and inquiry were on every countenance. The guards were besieged with anxious faces, supplicating intelligence, and much impeded thereby in their progress to the abbey. Outside the gates they found a dense crowd waiting for the news. The abbot and his brethren were in close council, expecting every moment the arrival of warders from the beacon. They were hurried into the chapter-house, together with their prisoner, who had now taken to the sulks, refusing any reply to the numerous inquiries made by the servants who followed, eager for the final disclosure. The room was lighted by a single lamp. Little of the interior was visible, save the grim and ascetic faces of the monks who sat nearest to the centre of illumination. Their features, in deep masses of alternate light and shadow, looked as if carved out, hard and immovable, from the oak wainscot. Occasionally, a dull roll of the eye relieved the oppressive stillness, and the gazer would look out from the mystic world he inhabited, through these loop-holes of sense, into the world of sympathies and affections, with which he had long ceased to hold communion. Paslew was standing when they entered. His bushy grey eyebrows threw a strange and almost unnatural shade over the deep recesses beneath, across which, at times, like the foam swept over the dark billows of the spirit, a light and glowing track was visible, marking the powerful conflict within. "Nicholas Dewhurst and Daniel Haydock." He shaded his eyes from the light, as he thus addressed the foremost of the party who had just entered. "From what quarter was the signal first visible?" "My lord," said Dan, "we are but unworthy of your highness' grace, did we not answer truly." "Quick!--Thou art slower to thine answers than thy words. Why tarriest thou?" "If your highness will pardon"-- "What?" said Paslew, in a voice that made the culprits quake. "I pardon nothing. What means this silence?" "Please your reverence," said Will, now advancing from the rear, his rhetorical flourishes somewhat curtailed, and his confidence thereby wonderfully abated, "the first signal was our own, lighted by an incendiary, to wit, and here we bring him to your highness' reverence for judgment. We ordered the rope and the broad beam to be ready by daybreak."