to the right and to the
left. Nobody! I called. No answer! The sound of my voice, repeated by
the echoes, filled me with fear. Night settled down slowly. A vague
sense of horror oppressed me. Suddenly the story of the young girl who
had disappeared occurred to me; and I began to descend on the run;
but, arriving before the cavern, I stopped, seized with unaccountable
terror: in casting a glance in the deep shadows of the spring I had
caught sight of two motionless red points. Then I saw long lines
wavering in a strange manner in the midst of the darkness, and that at
a depth where no human eye had ever penetrated. Fear lent my sight,
and all my senses, an unheard-of subtlety of perception. For several
seconds I heard very distinctly the evening plaint of a cricket down
at the edge of the wood, a dog barking far away, very far in the
valley. Then my heart, compressed for an instant by emotion, began to
beat furiously and I no longer heard anything!

Then uttering a horrible cry, I fled, abandoning the horse, the
carriage. In less than twenty minutes, bounding over the rocks and
brush, I reached the threshold of our house, and cried in a stifled
voice:

"Run! Run! Sir Hawerburch is dead! Sir Hawerburch is in the cavern--!"

After these words, spoken in the presence of my tutor, of the old
woman Agatha, and of two or three people invited in that evening by
the doctor, I fainted. I have learned since that during a whole hour I
raved deliriously.

The whole village had gone in search of the commodore. Christian Weber
hurried them off. At ten o'clock in the evening all the crowd came
back, bringing the carriage, and in the carriage the clothes of Sir
Hawerburch. They had discovered nothing. It was impossible to take ten
steps in the cavern without being suffocated.

During their absence Agatha and I waited, sitting in the chimney
corner. I, howling incoherent words of terror; she, with hands crossed
on her knees, eyes wide open, going from time to time to the window to
see what was taking place, for from the foot of the mountain one could
see torches flitting in the woods. One could hear hoarse voices, in
the distance, calling to each other in the night.

At the approach of her master, Agatha began to tremble. The doctor
entered brusquely, pale, his lips compressed, despair written on his
face. A score of woodcutters followed him tumultuously, in great felt
hats with wide brims--swarthy visaged--shaking the ash from th