There was a back kitchen in this house, and from this she heard, as if
coming from below its foundations, a sound like heavy strokes, that
seemed to shake the earth beneath her feet. Sometimes a dozen in
sequence, at regular intervals; sometimes fewer. She walked out softly
into the passage, and was surprised to see a dusky glow issuing from
this room, as if from a charcoal fire.

The room seemed thick with smoke.

Looking in she very dimly beheld a monstrous figure, over a furnace,
beating with a mighty hammer the rings and rivets of a chain.

The strokes, swift and heavy as they looked, sounded hollow and distant.
The man stopped, and pointed to something on the floor, that, through
the smoky haze, looked, the thought, like a dead body. She remarked no
more; but the servants in the room close by, startled from their sleep
by a hideous scream, found her in a swoon on the flags, close to the
door, where she had just witnessed this ghastly vision.

Startled by the girl's incoherent asseverations that she had seen the
Judge's corpse on the floor, two servants having first searched the
lower part of the house, went rather frightened up-stairs to inquire
whether their master was well. They found him, not in his bed, but in
his room. He had a table with candles burning at his bedside, and was
getting on his clothes again; and he swore and cursed at them roundly in
his old style, telling them that he had business, and that he would
discharge on the spot any scoundrel who should dare to disturb him
again.

So the invalid was left to his quietude.