And even as this disastrous fear occurred to him, the roar of the falling water was heard on the lower level of the empty mine, more than a thousand feet below him, while the lantern he carried cast strange gleams on the damp, slimy, and discoloured masonry of the shaft, after he left behind, or rather above him, the fringe of weeds and gorse, that grew about the mouth; yet in less than a minute he was assured that the water he heard falling, proceeded, not from the flow of the tide, as he and his companions foreboded, but from some subterranean spring falling into the shaft, far below the upper entrance of the Pixies' Hole; and anything more weird, dreary, and ghastly than that cavernous fissure which now opened off it on one side, and which he was preparing cautiously to explore, it would be difficult to conceive. From its rocky and ragged mouth, which was covered with white and pendant stalactites and hideous fungi, on which the light of his lantern fell with fitful rays, its interior receded away into dark and gloomy blackness and uncertainty. "Good Heaven!" muttered Audley, "the poor girl cannot be here. Should she have fallen down the shaft!"--was his next terrible thought. "Are ee saafe, sur?" cried Treherne, peering down from above. "All right, old fellow--stop lowering and make fast the rope; I am just at the place, and a horrid one it is." Ere he entered it, and cast off the cradle by which he had descended, he could hear in the obscurity beyond the surging or gurgling sound of the tide, at the lower end; and a nervous chill that he might find Sybil drowned, came over his heart. "Well, by Jove!" he muttered; "of all the places in this world, to search for a young lady, who would think of this--down the shaft of a devilish old copper mine! I have seen some queer things in India, but this out-herods them all!" Carrying the lantern so that its light should precede and guide his steps, he had barely gone twenty paces, when he discerned something white amid the dense gloom. Within but a few feet of the still encroaching water, a female figure was lying on a shelf of rock, from which she started into a half sitting posture, and gazed upward at him, with a wild and startled expression, in which hope and fear, joy and wonder, were singularly mingled. She was that Sybil Devereaux of whom he was in search; her dress, a white pique, all soiled, bedrabbled and wet, her fine dark hair dishevelled and sodden, her hat and veil gone, and her whole aspect forlorn and pitiable. "I am saved!" she exclaimed in a wailing and excited voice; "I thank Heaven--I thank kind God that you are come to me; but how--and who are you that have had the courage----" "Audley--Audley Trevelyan--don't you know me, Miss Devereaux?" said he, as he placed the lantern on a rock, and raised her tenderly in his arms.