His presence betrayed by the mastiff, and his departure challenged by the warder, she had flown instantly to the alarm-bell, to screen herself in any case, and to secure the chance, if he should be taken, of liberating him without suspicion under cover of the credit of his capture.

The theory was a bold one, but then it accounted for all the points--amongst the rest, how he had got the password and why he would not tell--and was indeed in the fineness of its invention equally worthy of both the heart and the intellect of the theorist.
Nor were mistress Fuller's resolves behind her conclusions in merit: of all times since first she had learned to mistrust her, this night must Dorothy be watched; and it was with a gush of exultation over her own acuteness that she saw her follow the men who bore Richard from the hall.
If Dorothy knew more of her own feelings than she who watched her, she was far less confident that she understood them.

Indeed she found them strangely complicated, and as difficult to control as to understand, while she stood gazing on the youth who through her found himself helpless and wounded in the hands of his enemies.

He was all in the wrong, no doubt--a rebel against his king, and an apostate from the church of his country; but he was the same Richard with whom she had played all her childhood, whom her mother had loved, and between whom and herself had never fallen shadow before that cast by the sudden outblaze of the star of childish preference into the sun of youthful love.

And was it not when the very mother of shadows, the blackness of darkness itself, swept between them and separated them for ever, that first she knew how much she had loved him?
What if not with the love that could listen entranced to its own echo!--love of child or love of maiden, Dorothy never asked herself which it had been, or which it was now.