“You slept very sound,” said she, blinking at the light.

“I had not slept for nearly ninety hours, and they had held more for me than any ninety weeks before.  But it was rude of me to go off like that and leave you all alone.”

“You could no more help it than I can help being very hungry.  You have slept three days and three nights, I believe.  I wonder George Hamon is not back for us.”

“Let’s look at the milk,” I said, and tasted it and found it sweet.

“That’s because the air here is so cool and even,” said Carette.

“Well, I feel all the better, anyway, and so do you, I’ll be bound.  I’m beginning to think, you know, that we were over fearful perhaps, and that we need not have come hiding here at all.”

“We’ll know better when we hear what’s going on outside.  Your grandfather and George Hamon are not men to be over fearful, and they thought it well.”

“That is so,” I said, feeling better at that.

“I wonder if it is day or night, and how long we’ve really been in here?”

“Long enough to be hungry, anyway,” I said, heartily ready to eat.  And we fell to on Aunt Jeanne’s ham and rabbit pie, Carette cutting up all I ate into small pieces with my knife, since we had forgotten to bring any other.  We drank up the milk out of the big-bellied tin can, and never was there sweeter milk or sweeter can, for Carette had first drink.  And then, lest it should get foul, we started off to find the fresh water to wash it out and bring back a supply.

There was no mistaking the hollow place where the fresh water was.  The light of the lantern fell on many a narrow rift in the walls of rock on either side, all sharp cracks and fissures, with rough-toothed edges, as though the solid granite had been split with mighty hammer-strokes.  The seams were all awry, and the lines and cracks were all sharp and straight, though running into one another and across in great confusion.  And, of a sudden, in the midst of this tangle of straight clefts and sharp-pointed angles, we came on a little rounded niche where the wall was scooped out in a graceful curve from about our own height to the ground.  It was all as smooth and softly rounded as if wrought by a mason’s chisel, and as we stood looking at it with surprise, because it was so different from all the rest, a movement of the lantern showed us a greater wonder still.  At our feet, in a smooth round basin, bubbled the spring, and looked so like a great dark eye looking up at us in a dumb fury that we both stood stark still staring back at it.

The dark water rushed up from below in coils and writhings like the up-leap of the tide in the Gouliot Pass, and our lantern set golden rings in it which floated brokenly from the centre to the sides, and gave to it a strange look of life and understanding.  So strong was the pressure from below that the centre of the little pool seemed higher than the sides.  It looked as though the pent-up force within was striving all the time to shoot up to the roof and any moment might succeed.