The Warder's Room was an excellent example of the famous rule that no stronghold is stronger than its weakest part. Its three outer walls, the one namely terminating the wing, the blind one giving upon the pleasaunce, and the one overlooking the moat, seemed stout enough to defy the teeth of Old Time himself; but the partition wall dividing it from Ruth's chamber beyond, was by comparison a mere piece of pie-crust, though pie-crust of perhaps rather a tough sort, inasmuch as its panellings were composed of oak of no mean thickness. Here and there, however, whether simply from age, or whether the water-rats infesting the moat below were answerable for any share in the mischief, it was certain the wood showed signs of decay; and one day when Ruth was dusting and polishing the richly carved panels, as it was her pride to do, one large square of them fairly gave way, and fell inwards behind the skirting board. [Sidenote: A hiding place.] Groping with both hands to recover it, Ruth found to her astonishment, that, instead of coming, as she expected, into contact with the corresponding panelling of the room beyond, they strayed off into space, and on closer examination of the framework of the fallen panel, she found that it was grooved. Surely it looked vastly as if she had come upon one of the sliding panels old Adam Lockit declared the house was full of! Very like it indeed, Ruth thought as she kindled a light with her tinder-box, and stepping with it into the pitch-dark cavity, looked round. Barely high enough for her to stand upright in, it evidently extended on each side of the opening, to the stone and brickwork supports of the arched communicating door, of which as we have already seen Richard Rumbold secured the key into his own keeping. Thus the opening formed a dark passage of nearly a couple of feet wide, and six or seven feet long. While she was occupied in these investigations a sudden hustling, shuffling sound in the room beyond, ordinarily as still as the very vaults of Stanstead Church, nearly startled her out of her senses. The next instant, however, her own merry laugh at her own terrors broke the echoes, for what was the disturbance but the scratching of the rats, whom her tour of discovery had sent stampeding willy nilly, like bad Bishop Hatto's long-tailed visitors: "From the right and the left, from behind and before, From within and without, from above and below." Up by the chimney, down by the open windows plump into the moat. [Sidenote: Ruth's secret.]