The bars on either side of it proved equally yielding, and though some cost more trouble than others, I succeeded in about half-an-hour in breaking away sufficient to effect an entrance. The window behind the bars was easily forced, and once more I found myself standing inside Kilgorman. It would be a lie to say that I felt no fears. Indeed every step I took along the dark passage helped to chill my blood, and long before I had reached the door of the great kitchen I wished myself safe outside again. But shame, and the memory of that pathetic message from my dead mother, held me to my purpose. And, as if to encourage me, the candle stood where I had found it once before on the little ledge, and beside it, to my astonishment, a small crust of bread. It must have stood there a week, and was both stale and mouldy. But to my famishing taste it was a repast for a king, and put a little new courage into me. It surprised me to find the great apartment once again crowded with arms, stacked all along the sides and laid in heaps on the centre of the floor. What perplexed me was not so much the arms themselves as the marvel how those that brought them entered and left the house. But just now I had no time for such speculations. I was strung up to a certain duty, and that I must perform, and leave speculation for later. My mother's letter, if it meant anything, meant that I was to seek for something below or behind the great hearth; and as I peered carefully round it with my candle I could not help recalling the ghost which Tim and I had both heard, years ago, advance to this very spot and there halt. Save the deep recess of the fireplace itself, there was no sign above or below of any hiding-place. The flagstones at my feet were solid and firm, and the bricks on either side showed neither gap nor crack. I pushed the candle further in and stepped cautiously over the crumbled embers into the hollow of the deep grate itself. As I did so a blast from above extinguished the light, and at the same moment a sound of footsteps fell on my ear, not this time from the outer passage, but apparently from some passage on the other side of the wall against which I crouched. I felt round wildly with my hands for the opening by which I had entered. Instead of that I found what felt like a step in the angle of the wall, and above it another. An instinct of self-preservation prompted me to clamber up here, and ensconce myself on a narrow ledge in the chimney, some six feet above the level of the ground. Here I waited with beating heart as the footsteps came nearer. I could judge by the sound that they belonged not, like the last I had heard, to a wandering woman, but to two men, advancing cautiously but with set purpose, and exchanging words in whispers.