"Why, every one is a-bed but me, and I was just agoing," replied the man. "But I will see." So saying, he departed, but returned in a few minutes with another light, and a stick of sealing-wax; and, finding the prisoner still writing, he left him, telling him that he was just going to bed, but if he would push the letter under the door, it should be sent the first thing next morning. Captain Delaware gladly saw him depart, and ere he had concluded, and sealed his letter, heard unequivocal signs of one at least of his jailers having fallen into a sound sleep. He listened anxiously, again and again, but all was silent in the house, except the dull, hard breathing of the constables, in the anteroom. It was now half-past eleven, and the hour at which the horse was to be at the back park gate was so near, that it became necessary to execute his design with promptitude; yet there was something painful in it altogether, which made him linger a moment or two in his father's house, calling up its host of memories, and evoking from the dim night of time, the sweet and mournful spirit of the past. He felt, however, that it was all in vain--that such thoughts but served to weaken him; and, taking up the light, he approached his bedside, and once more raised the trapdoor. The little ladder stood ready, just as it used to stand in the days of his childhood, and descending slowly, step by step, holding the light in one hand, and supporting the trapdoor in the other, he reached the last step but two or three, and then suffered the door to close over his head. The narrow cavity in which he now was, filled the centre of one of those internal buttresses, if I may use the term, into the masonry of which one of the back staircases of the old mansion was joisted. It was about six feet square in the inside, and at the first floor beneath his own, afforded a sort of landing-place, on which the ladder rested. Thence, again, a more solid stair of stone wound down to a sort of vault under the terrace, in which was placed the great draw-well that supplied the house with the water principally used by the family.