He stared stolidly at me.

“Why you ask that?” he said.

“Because Lacroix has been instructed to take me by that route,” I answered.

Pierre said not a word, but smoked in silence.  I sat upon the couch waiting.  His face was quite impassive, but I knew that my question was of tremendous import to me.

At last he shook the ashes out of his pipe and rose.  “Come with me,” he said.  “I show you—­because you frien’ of Ma’m’selle Jacqueline.  Come.”

I followed him out of the hut.  A large moon was just rising out of the east, but it was not yet high enough to cast much light.

Still Pierre seemed in deadly terror of Simon, for he motioned me to creep, as he was creeping, out of the enclosure, bending low beside the fence, so that a watcher from the chateau might not detect our silhouettes against the snow-covered lake.

When we were clear of the chateau, or, rather, the lit portion of it, Pierre began to run swiftly, still in a crouching position, and in this way we gained the tunnel entrance.

He took me by the arm, for it was too dark for me to follow him by sight, and we traversed, perhaps, a mile of outer blackness.  Then I began to see a gleam of moonlight in front of me, and, though I had not been conscious of making any turn, I discovered that we must have retraced our course completely, for I heard the roar of the cataracts again.

Then we emerged upon a tiny shelf of rock some forty feet up the face of the wall, and quite invisible from below.  It was a little above the level of the chateau roof, about a hundred yards away.  Below me I could see the main entrance to the tunnel.

We had a foothold of about ten feet on the level platform, which was slippery with smooth, black ice, and thundering over us, so near that I could almost have touched it had I stretched out my hand, the whirling torrent plunged into that hell below.

It was a terrific scene.  Above us that stream of white water, resembling nothing so much as a high-pressure jet from a fireman’s hose magnified a thousand times, curved like a crystal arch, and so compact by reason of its force that not a drop splashed us.  It was as strong as a steel girder, and I think it would have cut steel.

Pierre caught my arm as I reeled, sick with the shock of the discovery, and yelled into my ear above the dim.

“Le Vieil Ange!” he cried.  “This way Simon mean you to go to-morrow.  Lacroix him tell you:  ‘Get down, we find the road.’  He take you up here and push you—­so.”

He made a graphic gesture with his arm and pointed.  I looked down, shuddering, into the black, foam-crested water, bubbling and whirling among the grotesque ice-pillars that stood like sentries upon the brink.

The horror of the plot quite unmanned me.  I groped for the shelter of the tunnel, and clung to the rocky wall to save myself from obeying a wild impulse to cast myself headlong into the flood below.