d to be faithful to her. The mystery of the noises was out now;
Affery, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and
always wrong in the theories she deduced from them.

When the storm of dust had cleared away and the summer night was calm
again, numbers of people choked up every avenue of access, and parties
of diggers were formed to relieve one another in digging among the
ruins. There had been a hundred people in the house at the time of its
fall, there had been fifty, there had been fifteen, there had been
two. Rumour finally settled the number at two; the foreigner and Mr
Flintwinch. The diggers dug all through the short night by flaring pipes
of gas, and on a level with the early sun, and deeper and deeper below
it as it rose into its zenith, and aslant of it as it declined, and on a
level with it again as it departed. Sturdy digging, and shovelling,
and carrying away, in carts, barrows, and baskets, went on without
intermission, by night and by day; but it was night for the second time
when they found the dirty heap of rubbish that had been the foreigner
before his head had been shivered to atoms, like so much glass, by the
great beam that lay upon him, crushing him.

Still, they had not come upon Flintwinch yet; so the sturdy digging and
shovelling and carrying away went on without intermission by night and
by day. It got about that the old house had had famous cellarage (which
indeed was true), and that Flintwinch had been in a cellar at the
moment, or had had time to escape into one, and that he was safe under
its strong arch, and even that he had been heard to cry, in hollow,
subterranean, suffocated notes, 'Here I am!' At the opposite extremity
of the town it was even known that the excavators had been able to open
a communication with him through a pipe, and that he had received both
soup and brandy by that channel, and that he had said with admirable
fortitude that he was All right, my lads, with the exception of his
collar-bone. But the digging and shovelling and carrying away went on
without intermission, until the ruins were all dug out, and the cellars
opened to the light; and still no Flintwinch, living or dead, all right
or all wrong, had been turned up by pick or spade.

It began then to be perceived that Flintwinch had not been there at the
time of the fall; and it began then to be perceived that he had been
rather busy elsewhere, converting securities into as much money as could