-it is Lalor
Maitland, come to kill my poor Louis!"

And indeed it was difficult to get her aroused sufficiently to help us.
Left to herself I do not doubt that she would have gone up-stairs and
fled with the child in her arms in the hope of hiding him in the wood.

At last we got it out of her that the keys of the cellar were in the
great cupboard behind the door. She directed us to a double flight of
broad stairs. Irma had only looked into the cellar when she first came,
and had found it rifled, the barrels dry and gaping, full of dust,
dry-rot and the smell of decay.

But she too had heard her father tell of the passage to the ice-house,
and how he and his brothers had used it for their escapades when the
house was locked up and the keys taken to their father's room.

We went down--I leading with "King George" under my arm and the two
girls following. But on the stairway a sudden terror leaped upon Irma.
While we were all down in the cellar, might not Lalor and his companion
enter by the front door, or by some unguarded window. So she turned and
ran back to the little boy's room to defend him with an old pistol I had
found on the wall and loaded for her with powder and ball.

Then Agnes Anne and I made our way into the cellar. We had taken with
us the lantern, which we had hitherto kept covered, lest by the moving
of the light about the house we might be suspected of being on our
guard.

Hastily I made the tour of the great cellar. The back of the place was
full of the _debris_ of ancient barrels, some intact, some with gaping
sides, many held together with no more than a single hoop. But packed
together in one corner and occupying a place about one third of the
whole area of the floor was something very different. Tarpaulined,
fastened together by ropes, and guarded from damp by planks laid below
them, were some hundreds of kegs and packages--all, so far as I could
see, marked with curious signs, and in some cases the names of places.
One I remember, "Sallet Ooil--Apuglia," gave me a sense of such distance
and strangeness, that for a moment I seemed to be travelling in strange
countries and seeing curious sights, rather than going down to risk my
life in Miss Irma's quarrel with men I had never seen.

It was very evident that there could be but one place where the passage
Irma had spoken of (on her father's information) could debouch upon the
great cellar of Marnhoul. In the angle behind the mass of kegs was