'In a cave down below!' cried Peggy, trying to make her voice carry in the hollow atmosphere.
Now that help was near she was her brisk, capable self again, and, seizing the lantern, searched round every foot of the cavern till she discovered what seemed to be the beginning of a little staircase, long since blocked by earth and stones.
'Here, Father! Dig for us here!' she called, and taking up a stone, began to tap like she had heard of imprisoned miners doing in the coal-pits.
There was silence for a few minutes, and then the children began to hear the welcome sound of a pickaxe, and Father's voice every now and then, shouting a word of encouragement to them. At length there was a rumbling noise in the roof above, some loose stones and earth fell, and Father called loudly:
'Stand back! Keep out of the way!'
Peggy clutched Bobby, and retreated into the passage, while a shower of stones and soil came pouring down into the cave, till a great rent was made in the roof, and Father dropped through the hole like Santa Claus down the chimney, only no saint was ever so welcome, even at Christmas-time.
It did not take very long for the children to be hauled up by Joe at the top, and they found themselves standing among the Abbey ruins in the early gray of the dawn, with Aunt Helen rushing to catch them in her arms, and Lilian hugging them and sobbing over them by turns, while Nancy, her face all blotched and swollen with crying, kept hovering round to put in a kiss whenever the others gave her a chance, and even old David cleared his throat hard, and 'blessed the Lord they were safe.'
Very little was said until the children had been warmed and fed and comforted by the dining-room fire, and then Mr. Vaughan would only allow the briefest account of their adventures before they were put to bed to sleep off the effects of their night of exposure. Nancy prophesied quinsy and pleurisy and rheumatic fever, but the Vaughans were a hardy race, and not even a cold resulted, in spite of her gloomy prognostications.
Peggy's quiet talk with Father next day was so entirely between themselves that I shall not repeat it; but it is often incidents, and not years, which help us to grow up, and somehow afterwards she always found herself dating events from that night in the cave, and all the part 'when I was little' came before, and the older and more sensible part seemed to follow afterwards.