“No. Except you know where it is—and even then—it is not so easy to find it. I find it by certain trees.”
“What is it?”
“It is the window of a little room in the rock, from which a stair leads down through the rock to a sloping passage. That is the end of it you see under the water.”
“Provided, no doubt,” I said, “in case of siege, to procure water.”
“Most likely; but not, therefore, confined to that purpose. There are more dreadful stories than I can bear to think of”—-
Here she paused abruptly, and began anew “—-As if that house had brought death and doom out of the earth with it. There was an old burial-ground here before the Hall was built.”
“Have you ever been down the stair you speak of?” I asked.
“Only part of the way,” she answered. “But Judy knows every step of it. If it were not that the door at the top is locked, she would have dived through that archway now, and been in her own room in half the time. The child does not know what fear means.”
We now moved away from the pond, towards the side of the quarry and the open-air stair-case, which I thought must be considerably more pleasant than the other. I confess I longed to see the gleam of that water at the bottom of the dark sloping passage, though.
Miss Oldcastle accompanied me to the room where I had left her mother, and took her leave with merely a bow of farewell. I saw the old lady glance sharply from her to me as if she were jealous of what we might have been talking about.