“‘Phebe!’ I said again—‘Phebe!’ She did not speak, but holding her child on her right arm, she raised her left hand and beckoned me, and pointed to the door, and went out. I followed her. She led me by ways I had never gone before, but have gone every year since that night. The same way I took you to-night, my bairn. The secret passage to the deep caverns under the foundations of the castle, the only way to them except through the trapdoor and shaft that runs two hundred feet down in a straight line—a way that is now known to none but me. Even you could no find it again. She led me through the secret passage and down the many, many steps cut in the solid rock, down, down, down, her light making the steep path light before me until we reached the Dungeon of the Dark Death—and even that she lighted up.
“She led me to a spot where her dead body lay on the ground, just under the bottom of the shaft, that reached only to the ceiling or roof above. Her body lay with the body of her babe, just as if they both had dropped down there and fallen asleep. I knew they were dead. I knew every bone in both was broken, though that did not appear on the outside. It was under where they struck the ground that the horror of death was. I knew also, as if I had seen it all, how she had died—how she had been entrapped to her sudden death—how she had not even suffered. There had been a swift fall, a shock, nothing, and then a wonderful coming to life in a new form.
“I tell you, lass, it was no dream, no dream! but a real seeing. And it was wonderful to stand there by the two crushed, dead bodies and see the two living souls. I thought of the chrysalis and the butterfly, the worm and the moth, the eggshell and the bird, as I stood there between life and death, and seeing both.
“And without any speech at all, my lass made me know how she had been betrayed to death—how, every one being gone off the place, and she alone in her hut, my lord had come to her and pretended to make it all up with her, and had asked her to walk with him in the hall of the old castle. And she had gone. And they walked up and down, up and down, until suddenly, when she was passing with her babe over the trapdoor they had passed so many times, he suddenly stepped back, the door fell in, and she shot down, struck the ground two hundred feet below, and knew no more until she woke up in her new form—not dead, but living, never more to die.
“Presently she beckoned to me again, and walking before me, a form of rosy light, led me back again by the way we had come, up, up, up, to the upper air again. Nor did she leave me until we were back in the hut. She waved her arm and signed for me to lie down on the bed; and I minded her and did what she said. Then she stood by my bed waving her hand to and fro, to and fro, until I went to sleep. And I slept so deep and so long that it was broad daylight, with the sun shining in at the bare window, when I waked.
“No, it was no dream, bairn. Soon as I waked I minded all that had passed in the night, and I knowed it was no dream.
“I went no more out that day. At noon my lord came to the hut, the first time he had come for many a day. And he asked me, in a careless way:
“‘Where is that wench of yours, goody?’ And I looked him straight in the face, and answered him:
“‘Her body and her babe’s lie crushed to death on the stone floor of the deep dungeon where you cast her down; but she and her child—they are in Paradise.’
“He turned white as a sheet and he reeled in his saddle; but he quickly put on a bold face and said: