It was impossible to ascertain this now, in broad daylight, exposed to curious eyes. With a wildly beating heart, every thought but of the lost treasure again forgotten, Rees walked quickly away in the direction of the town library. He felt that he was bursting with this new discovery, that he must confide it to some one. Goodhare received him, seated in the library, surrounded by a pile of books of reference, the leaves of which he was busily turning for a pale, spectacled young man, who was taking notes by his side. Rees watched the librarian in amazement. It seemed scarcely conceivable that this grave, reverend-looking man, absorbed in intellectual work, and taking deep delight in it, could be the same creature whose eyes last night had shone with evil passions and almost ghoulish greed. In another moment, however, the spell was broken; Amos looked up, and there passed over his face the strange change which was like the peeping out of the spirit of evil through a hermit’s eyes. He finished his work, however, after only a brief, respectful request to Rees to wait. As soon as the spectacled young man had left them together, Rees, boiling with impatience, dashed across the room and communicated his discovery. Then they formed their plans for prosecuting the search, but, in their dread of prying eyes, decided to put off the execution of it until the next moonless night. During the four following days, in the course of which they thought it prudent not to revisit the castle, all three of the conspirators lived in a state of intermittent fever, haunted by fears that some accident would lay bare to others the secret which the earth had so long hidden. These fears, however, proved unfounded. On the night when they all groped their way to the river bank with no other light than a dark lantern, they found the stone slab and the loosened earth exactly as Rees had left them. Then began a task much heavier than they had expected. The stone was not far above high-water mark, and was situated near a bend in the river, so that the earth had accumulated upon it, especially at its base, during the ages which had elapsed since it was last displaced. The three men dug alternately for more than two hours and a half before there was any possibility of moving the stone. When they at last got clear of the surmounting obstructions, however, the task of raising the stone was comparatively an easy one. For, buried in the sand beside it, was a rusty iron bar, which they used, as it had evidently been used before, as a lever. The only thing which caused them still to doubt whether this was indeed the entrance to the passage was its extreme nearness to the water. However, all doubts on this point were soon set at rest; for, on raising the stone, they found that it covered the entrance to a narrow passage, not high enough even for a short man to stand upright in, which sloped rapidly down to the left, then, with a sharp curve, dipped more suddenly still to the right.