Breathless with anxiety, he crossed the two courts, and entered the vault with streams of water pouring down his mackintosh. The rain had done him good service; not only had it prevented Mrs. Crow’s boys from wandering among the ruins, but it washed down in torrents from the upper chambers, and rushing through the exposed grating, carried with it a quantity of the earth which had accumulated above. Rees could see the stone steps underneath, and with fiery energy he dug away spadeful after spadeful, until at last the grating, loosened in its place, shook under his feet. A few more frenzied efforts, and he was able to raise it half a dozen inches. He could scarcely restrain a cry of joy, which, however, speedily changed to a groan of disappointment. The grating was kept down by no hinges; it was more than two feet wide, of clumsy, old-fashioned workmanship, though of much later date than the last rebuilding of the castle in the fourteenth century. With great difficulty Rees raised it, tearing the flesh off his hands as he did so on the iron bars, which were caked with a hard deposit of rust. He had taken the precaution of bringing in his pocket a candle and matches. Striking a light he descended about a dozen rough and much worn stone steps in a sort of well hewn out of the solid rock. He had to move very carefully, as the steps were steep and unevenly covered with earth which the late rains had converted into mud; while the rude walls were too slimy with damp for the irregularities of their surface to afford him any hold. The air down here was cold; it chilled his heated body and made his teeth chatter. Taking a couple of steps rather more quickly than the rest in his excitement and impatience, his right foot suddenly splashed into water. Drawing it back hastily, he peered into the darkness at his feet, and saw that what he had taken for the entrance to a subterranean passage was apparently nothing more nor less than an old, long disused well. With a moan of anger and bitter disappointment, he sat down, with his feet on the lowest dry step, while a cold perspiration made him shiver from head to foot, and at the same time his forehead burned, and his mouth was so parched that, as he drew breath, he emitted a choking cough. He felt as if the hidden gold had been wrenched out of his eagerly clutching fingers, the gold which was to have supported his mother, showered presents on Deborah, restored his prestige as the genius of his family, and perhaps made him an earl’s son-in-law--for somehow that first idea of making known the discovery to the earl had, under the fire of Goodhare’s discourses, melted quite away. He had brought his spade with him, and he sat holding it idly in his hand, and not heeding the fact that the rain-water from above was all the while trickling down the steps, making his seat not only damp but dangerous. Suddenly he slipped, and the spade in his hand scraped the ground at the bottom of the water.