"Why, if it is so particular as all that, then," rejoined Lawrence, still half jestingly, but growing less and less light about his heart, "come this way." And pushing open a wicket, he conducted his companion along a rather miry slip of by-road towards the apple orchard, which stretched behind and around the ruined gatehouse, whose jagged outlines were beginning to stand out grim and gaunt in the sickly rays of the moon. Wading through the long grass so thickly carpeting the ground up to the tower, that its base was completely hidden, Lee conducted Rumbold to the top of a small flight of broken stone steps, so lost in an overgrowth of ivy trails and brambles as to be invisible to stranger eyes; but Lee, with a thrust of his hand, parted the leafy screen, and signed to Rumbold to follow him down the steps, which led to a low, iron-clamped and heavily padlocked door deeply sunken in the wall of the tower's foundations. [Sidenote: A secret vault.] "'Tis a well-screened spot, is it not?" said Lee, answering Rumbold's inquiring glances. "Well secured," said the cautious Rumbold, who had not much opinion of mere unaided twigs as safeguards, and seemed more disposed to admire the huge iron padlock adorning its latch. "What do you store here?" "Nothing." "Nothing?" "The place--except for a few bones, which may have been man's or sheep's for aught I know, or ever gave a thought to--is full of emptiness." "Yet you keep it as sealed as if it shut in untold riches." "As for the matter of that, it does, too, in a roundabout sort of way," said Lawrence smiling and colouring a little. "Or it may do so; for 'tis said--though I will not answer for the truth of it, that if you follow your nose far enough, the way it leads, you will find yourself in the vaults under your own gatehouse. Our houses--yours and mine--Master Rumbold, were built in queer times; when a man could not call his life his own. And when he dared not show his face above ground, slipped away as he could under it." [Sidenote: In darkness.] "And a fig then for his pursuers," said Rumbold, as he stepped into the vault, whose darkness was only lightened by the moon-rays feebly struggling in through the grating of a loophole high up in its walls. "A fig for them, hey?" "As you say," said Lawrence, faintly echoing the low laugh of his companion, which reverberated far away, in mocking unearthly discords, as though challenging the pair to explore the place's long-forgotten intricacies. "I doubt they must have been as successful as if they sought needles in a bottle of hay." "Shut the door!" said Rumbold. Lawrence obeyed, and what further Richard Rumbold had to say was heard by no eavesdroppers save the slug and reptile creatures who had long made the place their own. [Sidenote: A change for the worse.]