For the first few days of her illness, Duffel came to inquire after Eveline.  Finding that she was likely to remain sick for a length of time, if she ever recovered, he excused himself from further attentions by pleading the necessity of a previous engagement, which would probably require his absence for a week or possibly a fortnight.  With apparently the deepest solicitude for the recovery of Eveline and of sympathy for Mr. Mandeville, he took his leave.

When a little way from the house, he muttered to himself: 

“Well, I am free from the necessity of keeping up appearances here any longer.  Now for the cave!”

In a short time, he was threading his way through the forest, mounted on a fine animal.  A narrow path lay before him, which he followed for some miles, and then turned into the untrodden wilderness and wound his way through its trackless wastes.  There were no signs indicating that the foot of man or domesticated beast had ever pressed the earth in those solitary wilds; yet Duffel seemed familiar with the place, as was evident from his unhesitating choice of ways and careless ease.  He knew by marks, to others unseen, or, if seen, their significance unknown, that he was moving in the right direction.  Having traveled several miles in this way, he at length came to a beaten path, at right-angles with the course he had been going, into which he guided his noble beast.  After pursuing this latter course at a rapid rate for more than an hour, he again turned off into the woods, and, guided by the same mystic signs as before, shaped his course with unerring precision, notwithstanding the forest was so dense and overgrown with underbrush as to render it almost impervious to sight, and to an utter stranger a bewildering labyrinth, from whose mazes he might labor in vain to extricate himself, unless, indeed, he possessed the almost instinctive tact of the Indian, or the thorough knowledge of the most experienced backwoodsman.

Why Duffel was so obscurely careful in selecting his way, will presently be seen.  In the direction last taken, he traveled on until the sun was bending to the western horizon, when he came to a thicket of bushes and vines, so compact in growth it seemed an impossibility to enter it, even in a crawling position, without the aid of an ax and pruning-knife.  Glancing this way and that, as if to assure himself that no one was near, a precaution that might almost be set down as a useless exhibition of timidity in that wild out-of-the-way place, so far from the habitation of civilised man.  Duffel, when satisfied that no human eye was upon him, dismounted, and leading his steed by the bridle a short distance to the left, paused, looked around him again, and then lifting a pendant prong of a bush, with a very slight exertion of strength, he moved back a large mass of vines and branches, which had been with great care and ingenuity, and at the expense of much labor, wrought into a door or gate of living durability.