His eyes were closed, his lips bloodless, and through the grime his face was grey. With a gasp of horror she thought he was dead, but when she put her hand under his waistcoat she could feel the faint flutter of his heart. He had an electric torch somewhere in his pocket, he had told her, and she began to search. It necessitated moving him slightly, and as she did so he groaned. The lamp was in the tail pocket of his frock-coat, a square, flat lamp, of a type usually to be found in every room of Fossaway Manor.

She thought at first that the unconscious man carried two, but found that the second package was a spare battery. Switching on the light, she examined the roof above the broken stairs. She saw it was the underside of a slab of wood. From here she could see the rollers on which the table ran; stout things of wood. Near the head of the stairs two large wooden grips projected downwards, rather like the butts of huge Browning pistols, and she guessed that by this means the table was drawn back from below.

When she looked at Harry again he was staring upward with wondering eyes.

“What happened?” he asked.

“We must have fallen through a trap,” she said. “Do you think you could reach those handles?” She pointed to them.

He rose unsteadily to his feet, replaced his spectacles, which had been knocked off in his fall, and looked at the butts. Only two of the treads remained intact. He tried one, but it broke under his feet and the supporting posts were sagging.

“I can’t reach that,” he said. “It must be twelve feet high.”

Then she noticed his wound and made him sit down while she dressed it with a strip of silk torn from her skirt.

“How on earth did we get into this beastly place?” he asked, wondering. “Where are we?”

“We’re under the abbey,” she said, and his frown ended in a grimace of pain.

“Where is Dick?” he asked.

“He is up there, I think,” she said.

And yet why should Dick be there? He would not know his way into the lower chamber, she thought, with a sinking heart.

“Do you think you can walk?”

He looked round in dismay.

“I can walk all right, but whither?”

“Let us try the left-hand passage first,” she suggested, and he was agreeable.

The left-hand passage, they found, was a steep ascent which turned continuously to the left. It was like one of those corkscrew tunnels through which she had travelled in Switzerland, where the train burrows its way upwards in the heart of the solid rock. Was it above Montreux or on Pilatus? She was too tired to think.