“Judy has taken all that away.  Nothing in nature, and everything out of it, is strange to Judy, poor child!  But just look down a little way into the water on this side.  Do you see anything?”

“Nothing,” I answered.

“Look again, against the wall of the pond,” she said.

“I see a kind of arch or opening in the side,” I answered.

“That is what I wanted you to see.  Now, do you see a little barred window, there, in the face of the rock, through the trees?”

“I cannot say I do,” I replied.

“No.  Except you know where it is—­and even then—­it is not so easy to find it.  I find it by certain trees.”

“What is it?”

“It is the window of a little room in the rock, from which a stair leads down through the rock to a sloping passage.  That is the end of it you see under the water.”

“Provided, no doubt,” I said, “in case of siege, to procure water.”

“Most likely; but not, therefore, confined to that purpose.  There are more dreadful stories than I can bear to think of”—–­

Here she paused abruptly, and began anew “—–­As if that house had brought death and doom out of the earth with it.  There was an old burial-ground here before the Hall was built.”

“Have you ever been down the stair you speak of?” I asked.

“Only part of the way,” she answered.  “But Judy knows every step of it.  If it were not that the door at the top is locked, she would have dived through that archway now, and been in her own room in half the time.  The child does not know what fear means.”

We now moved away from the pond, towards the side of the quarry and the open-air stair-case, which I thought must be considerably more pleasant than the other.  I confess I longed to see the gleam of that water at the bottom of the dark sloping passage, though.

Miss Oldcastle accompanied me to the room where I had left her mother, and took her leave with merely a bow of farewell.  I saw the old lady glance sharply from her to me as if she were jealous of what we might have been talking about.

“Grannie, are you afraid Mr. Walton has been saying pretty things to Aunt Winnie?  I assure you he is not of that sort.  He doesn’t understand that kind of thing.  But he would have jumped into the pond after me and got his death of cold if auntie would have let him.  It was cold.  I think I see you dripping now, Mr Walton.”

There she was in her dark corner, coiled up on a couch, and laughing heartily; but all as if she had done nothing extraordinary.  And, indeed, estimated either by her own notions or practices, what she had done was not in the least extraordinary.

Disinclined to stay any longer, I shook hands with the grandmother, with a certain invincible sense of slime, and with the grandchild with a feeling of mischievous health, as if the girl might soon corrupt the clergyman into a partnership in pranks as well as in friendship.  She fallowed me out of the room, and danced before me down the oak staircase, clearing the portion from the first landing at a bound.  Then she turned and waited for me, who came very deliberately, feeling the unsure contact of sole and wax.  As soon as I reached her, she said, in a half-whisper, reaching up towards me on tiptoe—­