He looked at her with a smile. "It contains my treasures—my black arts," he said, "and my future." He pushed it back again and turned. "Come! we will find the naughty Cinders."
Chris was on the point of asking eager questions regarding this new mystery, but before she could begin to utter them a long and piteous howl—the howl of a lost dog—sent them helter-skelter from her mind.
"Oh, listen!" she cried. "That's Cinders!"
She sprang forward while the miserable sound was still echoing all about them. "Oh, isn't it dreadful?" she gasped. "Do you think he is hurt?"
"No, no!" Bertrand hastened to reassure her. "He is only afraid. We will go to him."
He stretched out a hand to her, and she put hers into it as naturally as a child. Her chin was quivering, and her voice, when she tried to call to the dog, broke down upon a sob.
"He will never know where we are because of the echoes," she said.
"He is not far," declared the Frenchman consolingly. "See, here is the passage. They say that it was made by the contrabandists, but it leads to nowhere; it has been blocked since many years. Do not fall on the stones; they are very slippery."
A passage, even narrower than the first, led from the cave in which they had been standing. Bertrand went first, his hand stretched out behind him, still holding hers.
They had scrambled in this order about a dozen yards when again they heard Cinders' cry for help—a pathetic yelping considerably farther away than it had been before. The unlucky wanderer seemed to have lost his head in the darkness and to be running hither and thither in wild dismay.