A cry escaped her with this awful conviction; but she uttered no more, for the echoes of her voice came back to her strangely and with melancholy variations, as if from vast distances. If the cavern mouth were totally submerged, should she be suffocated; or if not, might she otherwise too surely die of cold, and lie there till some holiday explorer, or some boy in search of puffins' nests, found her remains? A cold current of air that swept past her from within the cavern warned her that it had an outlet somewhere; but it filled her soul with greater terror, for she remembered to have heard Denzil, old Derrick Braddon, and others say, that the Pixies' Hole terminated in the shaft of an old and long unused mine, down which she might fall and be dashed to a very pulp, if she ventured one foot further; for all was gloomy horror round her now; and as her knees yielded under her, and she sank upon them to pray, she felt the still rising tide flow over them as it had rolled completely above the rocky arch of the cave and submerged it! Feeling the ground with her hands outspread, the unhappy girl continued to creep a few yards further in, and then she paused, for all that she knew to the contrary, on the very verge of the fatal mine! One little while she was full of pious resignation to die, for she had lived an innocent and guiltless life. She drew from her bosom a locket and fervently kissed it, as it contained the hair of her parents and Denzil--all she loved on earth. She knelt with her bowed head between her hands to shut out the horrid booming and sucking sounds of the sea in the lower part of the cave, and closing her eyes, as if the more to concentrate her thoughts, burst into passionate and vehement prayer. Then anon the horror of death--and especially of such a death, amid gloom and darkness, unseen, unpitied, and unknown, would draw from her a piteous wail, that was lost amid the bellowing of the sea, for a storm of wind had now risen in the channel. Of that newly-found admirer whom she had been learning to love, Audley Trevelyan, she had totally ceased to think; her heart was wholly occupied by thoughts of her papa, her mamma, her brother Denzil--all of whom she might never, never see more! Dread of falling headlong down the shaft of the ancient mine, more than a thousand feet, perhaps, made her, we have said, pause breathlessly, and lie on the sloping floor of rock, listening to her watery death coming nearer and nearer with a gurgling sound, that, to her nervous and excited imagination, seemed like the chuckle of a destroying fiend! The dark unspeakable himself was alleged by the peasantry to frequent the oozy recess of the Pixies' Hole, and the bottom of the old shaft was said, by the same veracious authorities, to be haunted by the unquiet spirits of ancient miners, who had perished there in the time of old.