He sought in several places to drive the point of his knife into the plaster; it would nowhere enter it more than a quarter of an inch: here was no built wall, he believed, but one smooth stone. He found nothing like a joint till he came near the edge of the recess: there was a limit of the stone, and he began at once to clear it. It gave him a straight line from the bottom to the top of the recess, where it met another at right angles.
“There does seem, my lady,” he said, “to be some kind of closing up here, though it may of course turn out of no interest to us! Shall I go on, and see what it is?”
“By all means,” she answered, but turned pale as she spoke.
Donal looked at her anxiously. She understood his look.
“You must not mind my feeling a little silly,” she said. “I am not silly enough to give way to it.”
He went on again with his knife, and had presently cleared the outlines of a stone that filled nearly all the side of the recess. He paused.
“Go on! go on!” said Arctura.
“I must first get a better tool or two,” answered Donal. “Will you mind being left?”
“I can bear it. But do not be long. A few minutes may evaporate my courage.”
Donal hurried away to get a hammer and chisel, and a pail to put the broken plaster in. Lady Arctura stood and waited. The silence closed in upon her. She began to feel eerie. She felt as if she had but to will and see through the wall to what lay beyond it. To keep herself from so willing, she had all but reduced herself to mental inaction, when she started to her feet with a smothered cry: a knock not over gentle sounded on the door of the outer room. She darted to the bedroom-door and flung it to—next to the press, and with one push had it nearly in its place. Then she opened again the door, thinking to wait for a second knock on the other before she answered. But as she opened the inner, the outer door also opened—slowly—and a face looked in. She would rather have had a visitor from behind the press! It was her uncle; his face cadaverous; his eyes dull, but with a kind of glitter in them; his look like that of a housebreaker. In terror of himself, in terror lest he should discover what they had been about, in terror lest Donal should appear, wishing to warn the latter, and certain that, early as it was, her uncle was not himself, with intuitive impulse, the moment she saw him, she cried out,