d men was pouring through the gates of
the great Abbey, clambering over the tiles, and with fierce outcries
diving down to the deepest cellars! But from gateway to gateway not a
brother was found. All had been warned in time. All had
departed--whither no man knew.

El Sarria, by his reputation for desperate courage, for a while kept the
mob from deeds of violence and spoliation. But still Rollo was not
found.

Concha, pale of face and with deep circles under her eyes, ran this way
and that, her fingers bleeding and bruised. In her despair she flung
herself upon one obstacle after another, calling for this door and that
to be forced. And strong men followed and did her will without halt or
question.

But of all others it was the cool practical John Mortimer who hit upon
the trail. He remembered how, on their first visit to Montblanch, Rollo
himself, at a certain place near the door of the strong-room in which
the relics were kept, had declared that he heard a sound like a groan.
And there in that very place Concha was driven wild by hearing, she knew
not whence, the voice of her lover. It seemed to her that he called her
by name.

Men ran for crowbars and forehammers. The floor was forced up by mere
strength of arm. The dislodging of a heavy stone gave access to an
underground passage, and men swarmed down one after the other, El
Sarria leading the way, a bar of iron like a weaver's beam in his hand.

The searchers found themselves in a strange place. The vaulting which
they had broken through so rudely, enabled them to scramble downward
amongst great beams and wheels to a raised platform covered with
moth-eaten black. The groaning which Concha had heard was stilled, but
as El Sarria held up his hand for silence they could hear something
scuffling away along the dark passages like rats behind a wainscot.

Without regarding for the moment something vague and indefinite which
lay stretched out on a strange mechanism of wood, El Sarria darted like
a sleuth-hound on the trail up one of the passages into which he had
seen a fugitive disappear. It was no long chase. The pursued doubled to
the right under a low archway. The dim passage opened suddenly upon a
kind of gallery, one side of which was supported on pillars and looked
out upon the great gulf of air and space on the verge of which the
Monastery was built.

The quarry came into view as they reached the sunlight, dazzled and
blinking--a smallish lithe man, runni