"And I am not helpless while they work their vile wills upon you," she answered. "Fate has been cruel enough, but she has spared us that. The end? That is still her mystery. Let us forget it."
He smiled.
"There is much I can remember which will spare me that. What you have been and done for me these last wild days—my memory will occupy itself with that and hope—while I work to make hope true."
And then, still smiling as if he had plumbed the eyes of Hope and found in them an answering smile, he laid the lantern on the flags and put his hands upon the barrier of ruin which faced him.
He toiled vigorously but with caution. As he rolled the larger blocks from their resting-place, he was quick to notice and to support the beams or flagstones which they had buttressed with their weight. And he used the first plank which tumbled out of the chaos as a lever upon its fellows. At his feet Claire worked vigorously, sweeping out the plaster which filled the openings as he made them, rolling aside the unseated stones to give him room, lending her lesser strength to aid his, when some task was trying his powers to the utmost.
For a couple of hours they toiled silently, and a gap had been hewn into the debris—a gap which seemed to be ceaselessly filled as the accumulations rolled into it from above, but an opening, nevertheless, which spoke of progress, which showed a reward for effort, which even pictured, faintly and indistinctly, a vision of hope. If their strength lasted? Was there not a chance, a tiny, elusive, but possible chance?
It was the remembrance that uninterrupted effort would fatigue them to a point where their strength would be taxed beyond recovery which made Aylmer at last call a halt. They went and sat beside the sleeping child. To economize the light, they extinguished the lamp.
And then—they rubbed their eyes.
A tiny beam of light, dim, faint, gray but distinguishable, was filtered down into their prison at the point where one of the cloister pillars reached an arch. It fell upon the flags in a little circle.
Aylmer reached it in two strides. He gave an exclamation.