Doudel spoke in a hoarse whisper; his voice was husky with apprehension. A single cry or failure of courage on the part of that frail girl, would inevitably plunge him into ruin. He moved close to the foundations of the nearest tower, and turned his face back, to make sure that she was following him. The face that met his was white as death. “Do not fear,” she whispered, “I will follow.” Doudel opened a ponderous door in the wall, and held it while she passed through. Then it was closed and they stood together in total darkness, but for the time safe from observation. Doudel felt for a lantern in a niche of the wall, struck fire from a flint and lighted it. Then he moved along a close stone passage, adown which Marguerite could hear the great water rats scuttling from the light. Down a flight of steep, slippery steps, and along other passages she followed her guide, as it seemed to her, into the very depths of the earth; for she could hear the waters sweeping and lapsing, as it seemed, above her head, and great clammy drops fell down upon her as she walked. It was a weird sight, if any one could have witnessed it—that tall man with his lantern, and the pale, resolute girl, delicate as a lily, gliding on behind him with that basket of bright flowers on her arm. Doudel sat down his lantern, took a great key from a bunch in his hand, and fastened it into the lock of a low iron-studded door, which swung backwards into the darkness. Marguerite heard a faint murmur and a rustling of straw, then a sharp cry as Doudel lifted his lantern and threw its light into the cell he had opened. She went forward, shivering all over with excitement, and looked in. A man was sitting upon some mouldy straw in a corner of the dungeon, holding two thin pallid hands before his eyes, shielding them from the sudden glare of the lantern. His beard, long and white, flowed down the garments that fell in mouldered and decaying tatters around him. His voice was feeble and broken, like that of an old, old man. Marguerite stood at the door one moment, with this miserable picture before her—the grim, dripping walls, the reeking straw, and that shadowy man, sitting upon it in pathetic helplessness, uttering his feeble protest against the pain of so much light. Then she stole across the little space of rocky floor and sunk to her knees by his side. “Father, father!” The prisoner hushed his voice and seemed to listen, but still kept both hands over his eyes. Marguerite placed her basket on the straw, and the breath of her flowers arose to his nostrils. All at once a sob shook his bosom, and the thin hands dropped away from his eyes, from which great tears of delight were rolling. He looked down upon the blossoms and touched them cautiously, with strange gleams of mingled joy and distrust. “They are yours, father,” said Marguerite in sweet, pathetic thankfulness, that she had given one ray of joy to that dreary man. “Will you not look at me now? I brought them for you.”