Only the picture, always horribly clear in his mind, of a gallows dark against a pale sky and the little fire beneath where the entrails of traitors were burned--a nightmare which had long ridden him--nerved him to the next step.

"His life or mine," he told himself, as he groped his way into a lane as steep, dank, and black as the sides of a well.
For some twenty yards he stumbled in an air thick with offal and garlic.

He heard steps ahead, the boots of the doomed magistrate and the slipshod pattens of the woman.

Then they stopped; his quarry seemed to be ascending a stair on the right.

It was a wretched tenement of wood, two hundred years old, once a garden house attached to the Savoy palace.
Lovel scrambled up some rickety steps and found himself on the rotten planks of a long passage, which was lit by a small window giving to the west.