Lady Saxondale and Dickey confronted two rather pale-faced girls when the party of explorers again stood in the sunlit halls above.  Across their shrinking faces cobwebs were lashed, plastered with the dank moisture of ages; in their eyes gleamed relief and from their lips came long breaths of thankfulness.  Turk, out of sight and hearing, was roundly cursing the luck that had given him such a disagreeable task as the one just ended.  From the broad, warm windows in the south drawing-room, once the great banquet hall, the quartet of uncomfortable sight-seekers looked out upon the open courtyard that stretched down to the fort-like wall, and for the moment Dorothy envied Philip Quentin.  He was briskly pacing the stone-paved inclosure, smoking his pipe and basking in the sunshine that had never penetrated to the horrors of Castle Craneycrow.  Lord Bob was serenely lounging on a broad oaken bench, his back to the sun, reading from some musty-backed book.

“Oh, won’t you let me go out in the sun for just a little while?” she cried, imploringly.  A mist came over Lady Saxondale’s eyes and Dickey turned away abruptly.

“As often as you like, Dorothy.  The courtyard is yours as much as it is ours.  Jane, will you take her through our fort?  Show her the walls, the parapets, the bastions, and where the moat and drawbridge were when the place was young.  It is very interesting, Dorothy.”

With Dickey and Lady Jane, Dorothy passed into the courtyard and into the open air for the first time in nearly a week.  She felt like a bird with clipped wings.  The most casual inspection convinced her that there was no possible chance of escape from the walled quadrangle, in the center of which loomed the immense, weather-painted castle.  The wall was high and its strength was as unbroken as in its earliest days.  Lord Saxondale joined them and explained to her all the points of interest about the castle as viewed from the outside, but Quentin quietly abandoned his walk and disappeared.

“It is as difficult to get out of Castle Craney-crow as it is to get in, I dare say,” observed Dorothy, looking with awe upon the grim old pile of rocks, they called a castle.  Far above their heads stood the tower, from which she had seen earth and sky as if in a panorama, three days before.

“One might be able to get out if he could fly.  It seems the only way, provided, of course, there were opposition to his departure,” said Lord Bob, smiling.

“Alas, I cannot fly,” she said, directly.

At the rear of the castle, where the stonework had been battered down by time, man and the elements, she saw several servants at work.  “You have trustworthy servants, Lord Saxondale.  I have tried to bribe one of them.”

“You see, Miss Garrison, they love Lady Frances.  That is the secret of their loyalty.  The chances are they’d sell me out to-morrow, but they’d die before they’d cut loose from my wife.  By Jove, I don’t understand how it is that everybody is won over by you American women.”