St. George and St. Michael. Volume II

But she found some relief in applying her mind to the task which / lord Worcester had set her; and many a night as she tossed sleepless / on her bed, would she turn from the thoughts that tortured her, to / brood upon the castle, and invent if she might some new possible / way, however difficult, of getting out of it unseen: and many a / morning after the night thus spent, would she hasten, ere the / household was astir, to examine some spot which had occurred to her / as perhaps containing the secret she sought. One time it was a / chimney that might have door and stair concealed within it; another, / the stables, where she examined every stall in the hope of finding a / trap to an underground way. Had any one else been in question but / Richard, the traitor, the roundhead, she might have imagined an / associate within the walls, in which case farther solution would not / have been for her; but somehow, she did not make it clear to herself / how, she could not entertain the idea in connection with Richard. / Besides, in brooding over everything, it had grown plain to her that / both Richard and Marquis had that night been through the moat.

Some who caught sight of her in the early dawn, wandering about and / peering here and there, thought that she was losing her senses; / others more ingenious in the thinking of evil, imagined she sought / to impress the household with a notion of her innocence by / pretending a search for the concealed flaw in the defences.