"It must be that all the houses are connected at this depth," she thought, her mind still so confused from the shock she had sustained and all her hurry and fright, that she did not perceive the folly of her wandering farther, "for I have certainly gone far beyond the length of a city block, even. Perhaps I am in the heart of a great aqueduct system—it is all walled and ceiled with stone."
At last the dim glow faded and she was in the utter dark. But she dared not go back, for she had no clew to the stone stairs and had lost all her reckoning.
A piercing chill grew in the dead air; the silence was terrifying. But just as her brain cleared and fear began to creep into her blood, such fatigue had laid hold on her that the fear could not choke her—she was too far spent.
"To die like a rat in a drain!" she whimpered. "To stifle underground! Oh, I am too old for it! He might have let me die in my bed!"
Just then she saw ahead of her—she could not say if it were far or near—an arch, the outline of a low door, lighted through the cracks of it, and she drove her weary feet toward this and bent upon it, but uselessly, for it was thick stone. With her last remnant of strength she set her mouth to the crack and screamed, and it seemed to her that three loud knocks upon the other side answered her in some sort. She screamed again. Again came the three knocks and close against the crack a voice whispered.
"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I adjure you, wandering soul, be quiet!"
The voice was shaking with a fear as great as her own, and this gave her courage. She put her lips to the crack and cried:
"I am no wandering soul, but a poor woman! I am lost in this great vault—open, and let me out!"
"Do you swear this by the Holy Trinity, the Wounds of Christ and—and the Sorrows of Mary?"
"I swear it by anything you wish," she called, "if you will open the door and see how little you have to fear from me! But I shall soon be as dead as you think me, unless you make haste, for I am nearly frozen."