"Oh yes there is!"
"Whose voice is that?" she asked. She could see no one—but at the same moment a sunbeam pierced through an aperture, pointed straight at what appeared to be a lift behind a slender column, and then faded away. It was a lift, made of ice and snow, as was everything else in the Castle. Rosella entered it and took a seat. The lift at once began gently and slowly to go down, down, first into the foundations of the Castle, and then into the interior of the hill right down under the snow, till it stopped in a Grotto lined with cobwebs and suffused with a mysterious green light. There was a soft, singing sound, as though made by the wind. In front was a frozen lake, and the ice of it was green from the same strange light.
"I must try and find my way to Grandfather," said Rosella vaguely as she wandered about the Grotto, looking about her for a way out.
Mrs. Silverton kept glancing anxiously at the clock and at the snowstorm. Davis entered. "Madam," said he, with an usually solemn face, "Mr. Silverton has telephoned again from the Moat House that Miss Rosella hasn't arrived."
"Then she must have lost her way!" exclaimed her mother, now thoroughly alarmed. "Though I don't see how she could, keeping straight across the moor to the Moat House gate at the end of the path. We must set out, Davis, and find her."
"Difficult this weather, Madam, if our young lady is lost on the moor."
"Is it still so bad?"
"The storm's not so thick as it was. I'll go immediately. There's no time to be lost, to my thinking, Madam."
"Yes, we'll go at once, Davis."