‘Then you must do without the ring.’
‘I want my ring again vastly. My father is cross because I have not got it, and I have promised to show it him. How can I keep my promise unless it be restored to me?’
‘Come, come!’ said the boy impatiently. ‘Whilst you are talking you might have got half-way to his den.’
‘I will only just speak to him,’ said Eve, ‘two words, and then run home.’
‘To be sure. That will be ample—two words,’ sneered the boy, and led the way.
The old mine adit was below the rocks near the river, and at no great distance from the old landing-place, where Jasper had recently constructed a boathouse. The ground about the entrance was thickly strewn with dead leaves, mixed with greenish shale thrown out of the copper mine, and so poisonous that no grass had been able to grow over it, though the mine had probably not been worked for a century or even more. But the mouth of the adit was now completely overgrown with brambles and fringed with ferns. The dogwood, now in flower, had thickly clambered near the entrance wherever the earth was not impregnated with copper and arsenic.
Eve shrank from the black entrance and hung back, but the boy caught her by the arm and insisted on her coming with him. She surmounted some broken masses of rock that had fallen before the entrance, and brushed aside the dogwood and briars. The air struck chill and damp against her brow as she passed out of the sun under the stony arch.
The rock was lichened. White-green fungoid growths hung down in streamers; the floor was dry, though water dripped from the sides and nourished beds of velvet moss as far in as the light penetrated. So much rubble covered the bottom of the adit, that the water filtered through it and passed by a subterranean channel to the river.
After taking a few steps forward, Eve saw Martin half sitting, half lying on a bed of fern and heather; the grey light from the entrance fell on his face. It was pale and drawn; but he brightened up when he saw Eve, and he started to his knee to salute her.
‘I cannot stand upright in this cursed hole,’ he said, ‘but at this moment it matters not. On my knee I do homage to my queen.’ He seized her hand and pressed his lips to it.