. _Avancez, donc, mes princes!_ your ancient spirit once made
plain the vacancies in the heads of his Grace's guests; let us see
if now you do not conceal some holes that were for poor Montaiglon's
profit."

One by one he pulled them out of their positions until he could intrude
a sensitive hand behind the shelves where they had been racked.

There was an airy space.

"_Tres bon! merci, messieurs les cadavres_, perhaps I may forgive you
even yet for being empty."

Hope surged, he wrought eagerly; before long he had cleared away a
passage--that ended in a dead wall!

It was perhaps the most poignant moment of his experience. He had, then,
been the fool of an illusion! Only a blank wall! His fingers searched
every inch of it within reach, but came upon nothing but masonry, cold,
clammy, substantial.

"A delusion after all!" he said, bitterly disappointed. "A delusion, and
not the first that has been at the bottom of a bottle of wine." He
had almost resigned himself again to his imprisonment when the puffing
current of colder air than that stagnant within the cell struck him for
the second time, more keenly felt than before, because he was warm with
his exertions. This time he felt that it had come from somewhere over
the level of his head. Back he dragged his box and stood upon it behind
the bottle-bin, and felt higher upon the wall than he could do standing,
to discover that it stopped short about nine feet from the floor, and
was apparently an incompleted curtain partitioning his cell from some
space farther in.

Not with any vaulting hopes, for an egress from this inner space seemed
less unlikely than from the one he occupied, he pulled himself on the
top of the intervening wall and lowered himself over the other side. At
the full stretch of his arms he failed to touch anything with his feet;
an alarming thought came to him; he would have pulled himself back,
but the top of the wall was crumbling to his fingers, a mass of rotten
mortar threatening each moment to break below his grasp, and he realised
with a spasm of the diaphragm that now there was no retreat. What--this
was his thought--what if this was the mouth of a well? Or a mediaeval
trap for fools? He had seen such things in French castles. In the pitch
darkness he could not guess whether he hung above an abyss or had the
ground within an inch of his straining toes.

To die in a pit!

To die in a pit! good God!--was this the appropriate conclusion to