An electric bulb glowed in the ceiling, and she was thankful for it. She took stock of her position as calmly as she could. The room was more like a cupboard than a cellar--it could have measured no more than eight feet by six. It had held a great deal of earth recently; the stone floor was half an inch deep in it still, and small clods of damp soil adhered to the walls. There was no window--no outlet of any sort except the door through which Lew had pushed her--but the door itself fitted loosely in its frame, so that there was no lack of air. She went to the door and ran her fingers under it. Despite its clumsiness, it was fashioned of three-inch oak. It might have been three-inch boiler steel for all the hope of escape it offered her; and, shoving her hardest, she couldn't make it budge against the heavy outside bar that held it shut. Leaning against the wall, she thought out the circumstances methodically. For armoury she had the pin of a small brooch and her two hands. Expectations--what? The story about Storm being injured might or might not be true, although now she was inclined to regard it as nothing more than a cock-and-bull yarn invented to decoy her. Strangely enough, her first emotion was of exasperation; she, old stager that she was, to have been caught on the hop with an antediluvian parlour trick like that! Well, how long would it be before she was missed? Terry, being an old friend of Storm's, might go down to the hospital himself later on, and then the fraud would be exposed. Or, if he didn't do that, and Storm was safe and sound, Kit'd be sure to ring her up in the morning; and, once he'd absorbed the news of her abduction, he wouldn't be likely to let grass grow under his feet. Extraordinarily comforting was that thought. Within a few hours--she looked at her watch--within eight hours at the very limit Storm would know all about it, would be out scouring the metropolis for her. The last feebly rising bubble of panic collapsed. She was sure, now, that Storm hadn't been smashed up. He'd be On The Job, moving heaven and earth to find her, and every Triangle in Christendom massed up in one big wad all round her, with barbed wire in front and a company of field artillery behind, wouldn't stop him.... Her day-dreaming was interrupted by the return of Mecklen, laden with a rough straw-filled mattress and a couple of coarse blankets. He dumped them on the floor and went out again. For a fraction of a second she had meditated attacking him from behind when his hands were full and his head turned, but the thought had died as quickly as it was born. She was strong and supple as a young mermaid, but she knew that against his rugged bulk such crude methods would be wasted. She might have got him in a ju-jitsu grip--she knew one or two----