Twenty steps farther Don Luis stopped.  He seemed to hear something.

He listened.  He was not mistaken.  The sound was repeated, and it was the sound of laughter.  But such an awful laugh!  A strident laugh, evil as the laughter of a devil, and so shrill!  It was more like the laugh of a woman, of a madwoman.

Again silence.  Then another noise, the noise of an implement striking the ground, then silence again.

And this was happening at a distance which Don Luis estimated at a hundred yards.

The path ended in three steps cut in the earth.  At the top was a fairly large plateau, also encumbered with rubbish and ruins.  In the centre, opposite Don Luis, stood a screen of immense laurels planted in a semicircle.  The marks of trodden grass led up to it.

Don Luis was a little surprised, for the screen presented an impenetrable outline.  He walked on and found that there had once been a cutting, and that the branches had ended by meeting again.  They were easy to push aside; and it was through here that the scoundrel must have passed.  To all appearances he was there now, at the end of his journey, not far away, occupied in some sinister task.

Indeed the air was rent by a chuckle, so close by that Don Luis gave a start and felt as if the scoundrel were laughing beforehand at his intervention.  He remembered the letter with the words written in red ink: 

There’s still time, Lupin.  Retire from the contest.  If not, it means your death, too.  When you think that your object is attained, when your hand is raised against me and you utter words of triumph, at the same moment the ground will open beneath your feet.  The place of your death is chosen.  The snare is laid.  Beware, Lupin!

The whole letter passed through his brain, with its formidable threat.  And he felt a shiver of fear.  But no fear could stay the man that he was.  He had already taken hold of the branches with his hands and was clearing a way for himself.

He stopped.  A last bulwark of leaves hid him from sight.  He pulled some of them aside at the level of his eyes.

And he saw ...

First of all, he saw Florence, alone at this moment, lying on the ground, bound, at thirty yards in front of him; and he at once perceived, to his intense delight, from certain movements of her head that she was still alive.  He had come in time.  Florence was not dead.  She would not die.  That was a certainty against which nothing could prevail.  Florence would not die.

Then he examined the things around.  To the right and left of where he stood the screen of laurels curved and embraced a sort of arena in which, among yews that had once been clipped into cones, lay capitals, columns, broken pieces of arches and vaults, obviously placed there to adorn the formal garden that had been laid out on the ruins of the ancient donjon-keep.

In the middle was a small circular space reached by two narrow paths, one of which presented the same traces of trodden grass and was a continuation of that by which Don Luis had come, while the other intersected the first at right angles and joined the two ends of the screen of shrubs.