stair
from another approach. The moment Alec looked up at him, he ran down
again, and had just dropped into a sort of well-like place which the
stair had used to fill on its way to a lower level, when he heard
Alec's feet thundering up over his head. Determined then to see what
the lady was like, for he had never seen her close, or without her
bonnet, which now lay beside her on the grass, he scrambled out, and,
approaching her cautiously, had a few moments to contemplate her before
he saw--for he kept a watch on the tower--that Alec had again caught
sight of him, when he immediately fled to his former refuge, which
communicated with a low-pitched story lying between the open level and
the vaults.

The sound of the ponderous and rusty bolt reached him across the
cavernous space. He had not expected their immediate departure, and was
rather alarmed. His first impulse was to try whether he could not shoot
the bolt from the inside. This he soon found to be impossible. He next
turned to the windows in the front, but there the ground fell away so
suddenly that he was many feet from it--an altogether dangerous leap.
He was beginning to feel seriously concerned, when he heard a voice:

"Do ye want to win oot, sir? They hae lockit the door."

He turned but could see no one. Approaching the door again, he spied
Annie, in the dark twilight, standing on the edge of the descent to the
vaults. He had passed the spot not a minute before, and she was
certainly not there then. She looked as if she had just glided up that
slope from a region so dark that a spectre might haunt it all day long.
But Beauchamp was not of a fanciful disposition, and instead of taking
her for a spectre, he accosted her with easy insolence!

"Tell me how to get out, my pretty girl, and I'll give you a kiss."

Seized with a terror she did not understand, Annie darted into the
cavern between them, and sped down its steep into the darkness which
lay there like a lurking beast. A few yards down, however, she turned
aside, through a low doorway, into a vault. Beauchamp rushed after her,
passed her, and fell over a great stone lying in the middle of the way.
Annie heard him fall, sprung forth again, and, flying to the upper
light, found her way out, and left the discourteous knight a safe
captive, fallen upon that horrible stair.--A horrible stair it was: up
and down those steps, then steep and worn, now massed into an incline
of beaten earth, had swarmed, for