She tried to take it from him, but he snarled round on her like an angry dog. “You devil!” he screamed. “You’re in league with Dick! You’re trying to rob me of life! But you sha’n’t, you sha’n’t!” The flask was corked with a piece of wood that had swollen. He dragged at it with his teeth and presently extracted the stopper. “I shall live eternally! But you shall die! He shall find you here dead, and realize…” He put the flask to his lips and drank. She covered her eyes with her hands, then, as he moved, gripped the knife. And then she heard something drop with a heavy crash to the floor and looked. The shingle was still sliding down like sand in an hourglass, but now something big and heavy thudded to the ground. It looked ludicrously like a yellow candle, but its weight was such that the first bar struck the pavement and the impact bent it hook-shape. Another followed. She watched, fascinated, as they came, first slowly, then in a stream, from the triangular space in the roof--scores, hundreds of yellow candles thundering down in twos and threes amidst the flow of shingle. “The gold, the gold!” screamed Harry. “But he shall never have it!” He lifted the lamp, but as his arm rose she stooped swiftly. The crash of the lamp as it struck the wall came to her and she crouched back toward the wishing well. She heard a loud crash in the chamber; a sector of the roof had given under the strain, and now, with a hiss and a rush, shingle and ingot were falling until they almost filled the room. They flowed about her feet like a heavy stream. She struggled to get it underfoot and became more and more engulfed. “Dick, Dick!” she screamed, but he did not hear her. He had reached the broken roof of the Cold Room and was slipping and sliding down the heap of shingle under which lay a man who was dead before the torrent of stone was loosened. Later they found him, gripping a crystal flask in his hand. What it had contained, no man ever knew. LXV When Leslie Gwyn woke, the sunlight was peeping round the edges of the drawn blinds. She sat up suddenly and her head went round and round. And then she remembered and her eyes closed, as if to shut out some horrible sight. “Oh, you _are_ awake?” said Mary Wenner, bustling in. “Dick sent me up to see how you were. Everybody’s most fearfully anxious about you--even Fabe, though I’m not of a jealous disposition, as everybody knows.” “What is the time?” Then, with a shiver, she remembered that somebody else had asked her that. How long ago? An eternity! “Twelve thirty-five,” said Miss Wenner, consulting her watch. “I’ve been out looking at the workmen. Really, my dear, it’s more like a Desirable Residential Estate than the grounds of Fossaway Manor. Wheelbarrows and navvies and goodness knows what! They say it’s cost his lordship twenty thousand pounds.” Leslie looked at her in wonder. “His lordship?” she said in a hushed voice.