She paused abruptly, with a sort of appalled recognition of the sentiment that animated her. A sudden illumination had broken in upon her; her heart throbbed tumultuously with pleasure, or was it pain? For she loved Jack Espey; and he--oh, was it true that he loved Adelicia still? She hardly heeded or realized her self-betrayal. She did not see--so little did she care--the pallid dismay, the heartbreak, on Jasper Larrabee's face. He could not deceive himself,--it was too patent. He turned away with a bitter sense of resentment, another grudge toward Jack Espey for thus slyly and completely supplanting him. At that moment his eye fell upon the jagged rock about the entrance of the Lost Time mine, and he drew back in amazement. "Why, where does all this water come from?" he exclaimed sharply. He wondered that he had not marked it before, despite his preoccupation. For the flow of the stream was quadrupled, its momentum every instant greater. Naught could enter now. The interior must be flooded anew. As he gazed at it, wide-eyed and dumfounded, a sudden enlightenment as to the phenomenon broke upon him. The blasting which he had heard,--he remembered it now; doubtless the concussion had brought down some mass of rock or earth, damming an underground current, and forcing its waters into the channel of the stream which partially emptied here, while the residue backed up and filled the spaces. He thought that Espey and the old man and "Tawm" had possibly made good their escape before it happened; but if not--and Taft--He remembered how close were the ghostly voices when he had last heard the false, cracked tones of command ring through the tunnel. Those ill-timbered galleries would fall to a certainty. He turned pale at the very thought of a living burial in the den of the still-room. He did not hesitate. Without a word he sprang upon the log, crossed the water, and sped away like the wind, leaving Julia gazing in astonishment after him. He thought his worst fears were realized, when he reached the store of the Lost Time mine. His hasty question elicited from the children only the fact of the absence of Taft and Copley. He ran down into the cellar, to find the obliteration of the traces of the old door, which he recognized only as an added precaution since his departure. Doubtless some other method of entering the tunnel had been devised. An axe hacking through the chinking served to reveal the ruin of the tunnel, and to admit a strong and pervasive odor of gunpowder.