“You needn’t come with me, Mrs. Crow,” he heard her call out as she ran. Rees followed her, all his anxiety about the safety of his secret alive again. She flew over the grass, a great sparrow-legged girl, not yet grown out of immature gawkiness, and got down the wooden steps somehow in a wonderfully short space of time. But in her haste she let the candle fall, and the light went out. Rees, at the top of the steps, looked down into the black vault, where he heard her groping about, and conceived the project of passing her again in the darkness, finding his way into the next and lower apartment, in which he had discovered the grating, and flattening down the earth to cover the traces of his work. At the doorway, however, were two steps; stumbling on the damp and slippery surface of the second, he made enough noise for her to find him. “Rees,” she cried, “don’t go away. This is a horrid place; something flapped past me. I feel quite frightened. It is you there, isn’t it?” Thinking that, by not answering, he should alarm her still more and induce her to find her way to the upper air, he was silent; and creeping away into a huge arched recess in the lower apartment, he leaned back and waited. But Lady Marion, though susceptible to feminine fears, had some courage and more curiosity. She hunted about on her hands and knees in the outer room until she found her box of matches, struck one, discovered her candle, and relighting it, prepared for an exhaustive search. He heard her manly footsteps--she and her sisters all wore flat-footed, “sensible” boots--tramping over the stones and the hard earth. He had just time to seize his pickaxe and spade, thrust them into a heap of loose rubble that filled one corner of the recess, and to kick a few spadefuls of earth over the uncovered grating, when she reappeared at the doorway. Holding her candle high, she looked round the walls suspiciously, without condescending to take any notice of the young fellow’s presence. Then she advanced slowly into the middle of the floor, peering curiously at the ground beneath her feet as she did so. Rees held his breath. The next moment, making up his mind that there was nothing else to be done, he sprang forward and flung his arms around her. “Marion, Marion,” he cried, “it can’t be true that you care for me if you won’t so much as look at me.” The ruse succeeded. Lady Marion, who, in spite of her affectation of mannishness, was at heart rather a limp, pliable, and easily dominated young woman, was taken aback. “Oh!” she exclaimed faintly, with a feeble feint of disengaging herself. “I suppose you don’t know--the earl won’t have let you know--that I proposed to him for you, and that he rejected me almost as if I had been a groom.” “Don’t, don’t, Rees, I can’t bear it. I’ve been miserable ever since.” “He told you then?”