The marrow froze in my bones. I struggled vainly to rush forward, but my feet would not obey my will. “My God!” I muttered from a crackled throat--“my God!” He was looking at me again across the glowing space, a grin twitching up his mouth like a dog’s. “If you move to come at me,” he said, “I leap down there and end it. He won’t thank you, though.” “Duke,” I forced myself to mutter, at length, in uncontrollable horror. “Is it Jason? Oh! be satisfied at last and God will forgive you.” “Why, so I am!” he cried, with a whispering laugh. “But I never sent him down there. He went of his own accord--a secret, snug hiding-place. But he should have waited longer; and who would have thought of looking so deep! It was his leaning over, as he came up, to put the lantern where it stands that drew me.” In the sickness of my terror I saw it all. Jason, flying back to the mill, mad with fear, mad for the means of escape--Jason, who had already solved the mystery of the treasure, and had only hitherto lacked the courage necessary to a descent upon it--Jason, in his despair, had seized a light, burst into the room of silence; had found the wheel stopped and the key in the lock, as I had left them; had, summoning his last of manliness, gone down into the pit and, returning, had met his fearful enemy face to face. I read it all and, utterly hopeless and demoralized as I was--knowing that a movement on my part would precipitate the tragedy--yet found voice to break the spell, and delivered my agony in a shriek. “Jason!” I screamed; “Jason! Climb up! You are as strong as he! Climb up and defy him! We are two to one!” Even as the volume of my cry seemed to strike a responsive weak echo from the bowels of the pit, I was conscious that Dr. Crackenthorpe was breathing behind me over my shoulder. And while the sound of my voice ran from beam to beam in devilish harmonics, the cripple suddenly threw up his arms with a quavering screech and leaped upon the threshold of the cupboard. “The man!” he yelled; “the dog, and now the man! I know him at last!” Dr. Crackenthorpe broke past me with an answering cry: “He fired my house! Stop him! The hound! Stop him!” As he sprang forward Duke, with a sudden swoop, seized the lantern from the floor and flung it at him; and at the same instant--as I saw by the flaming arc of light it made--clutched the rope and swung himself into the vault. The lantern crashed and was extinguished. The doctor uttered a fierce oath. Spellbound I stood, and for half a dozen seconds the weltering blackness eddied with a ghastly silence. Then I heard the doctor fling past me, running out of the room with a fearful exclamation on his lips, and, as he went, scream after scream rise from the depths, so that my soul seemed to faint with the agony of it. Groping, staggering, my brain reeling, I stumbled toward the sound. “God forgive me!” I whispered. “Death is better than this.”