Dead perhaps. She staggered blindly forward and came in contact with the wall. Gripping her hands till the nails cut the palms she strove to regain her self-control. He would be rescued; there were men with him, she told herself, and became calmer and again sat down, so that her back was to the wall, and waited, the open knife on her lap. Feeling in her pocket for a handkerchief, her hand touched the matchbox, and she took it out with a sense of gratitude.

She was weary to the point of exhaustion. The rough flooring had slashed the soles of her silk stockings to ribbons and her feet were terribly sore. She waited for some time before she struck her first match, for the box was already half empty. She saw that she was in a part of this underground system which was unfamiliar to her. The roof was higher; the walls bulged in like the sides of an hourglass, and the floor had been roughly paved. At intervals there seemed to be niches, alcoves in the wall, and again she thought of the Swiss tunnels with their safety niches. There was no sign of the lamp; evidently Harry had carried that with him when he had gone off. It was not like him to leave her; even in his delirium he would not have done that, she thought.

As the match burnt out she heard halting footsteps re-echoing down the passage, and, closing the knife, she slipped it into her jacket pocket and waited. He must have been a long way from her when she first heard him; the passage acting as a huge speaking-tube.

“Are you all right, Leslie?” He was normal again. “I’m sorry I had to leave you, but this place rather rattles me, and I had to go along and see if I could find an exit.”

“Where are we?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I carried you down that wretched circular arrangement, and you were fearfully heavy,” he added, so naïvely that the girl laughed for the first time in that period of horror. “Do you know, Leslie” – he squatted down on the floor by her side – “I have an idea. Do you remember those holes we looked through?”

“Yes, I remember them,” she said, wondering what was coming next.

“Do you know that they are placed in the side of a well of some kind?”

Not a word about Dick. He had forgotten the rope-cutting and the horror that followed.