were laughing beforehand at his
intervention. He remembered the letter with the words written in red ink:

There's still time, Lupin. Retire from the contest. If not, it means your
death, too. When you think that your object is attained, when your hand
is raised against me and you utter words of triumph, at the same moment
the ground will open beneath your feet. The place of your death is
chosen. The snare is laid. Beware, Lupin!

The whole letter passed through his brain, with its formidable threat.
And he felt a shiver of fear. But no fear could stay the man that he was.
He had already taken hold of the branches with his hands and was clearing
a way for himself.

He stopped. A last bulwark of leaves hid him from sight. He pulled some
of them aside at the level of his eyes.

And he saw ...

First of all, he saw Florence, alone at this moment, lying on the
ground, bound, at thirty yards in front of him; and he at once
perceived, to his intense delight, from certain movements of her head
that she was still alive. He had come in time. Florence was not dead.
She would not die. That was a certainty against which nothing could
prevail. Florence would not die.

Then he examined the things around. To the right and left of where he
stood the screen of laurels curved and embraced a sort of arena in which,
among yews that had once been clipped into cones, lay capitals, columns,
broken pieces of arches and vaults, obviously placed there to adorn the
formal garden that had been laid out on the ruins of the ancient
donjon-keep.

In the middle was a small circular space reached by two narrow paths, one
of which presented the same traces of trodden grass and was a
continuation of that by which Don Luis had come, while the other
intersected the first at right angles and joined the two ends of the
screen of shrubs.

Opposite was a confused heap of broken stones and natural rocks, cemented
with clay, bound together by the roots of gnarled trees, the whole
forming at the back of the picture a small, shallow grotto, full of
crevices that admitted the light. The floor, which Don Luis could easily
distinguish, consisted of three or four flagstones.

Florence Levasseur lay inside this grotto, bound hand and foot, looking
like the victim of some mysterious sacrifice about to be performed on the
altar of the grotto, in the amphitheatre of this old garden closed by the
wall of tall laurels and overlooked by a pile of ancestral ruins.