"Once in the passage, what will you do?"
"Last evening I took from the wooden casket, hidden yonder under the rubbish, a few strips of the parchment where Den-Brao had traced the plan of the buildings; I have posted myself on the localities. The secret gallery, in its ascent towards the castle, comes out, on the other side of the donjon, upon a secret staircase built in the thick of the wall. That leads, from the lowest of the three rows of subterranean dungeons, up to the turret that rises to the north of the platform."
"The turret," queried Joan, growing pale, "the turret, whence occasionally strange lights issue at night?"
"It is there that Azenor the Pale, the sorceress of Neroweg, carries on her witchcraft," answered the quarryman in a hollow voice. "It is in that turret that Colombaik must be, provided he still lives. It is there I shall go in search of our child."
"Oh, my poor man," murmured Joan, "I faint at the thought of the perils you are about to face!"
"Joan," suddenly interjected the serf, raising his hands towards the starry sky, visible through rifts in the roof, "before an hour the moon will have set; I must go now."
The quarryman's wife, after making a superhuman effort to overcome her terror, said in a voice that was almost firm: "I do not ask to accompany you, Fergan; I might be an encumbrance in this enterprise. But I believe, as you do, that at all costs we must try to save our child. If in three days you are not back—"
"It will mean that I have encountered death in the castle of Plouernel."
"I shall not be behind you a day, my dear husband. Have you weapons to defend yourself?"
"I have my iron pick and my hammer."