le following, with
crowbar still in hand. I learned, as I had surmised, that we were in
the upper hall of a staircase nearly as wide as the one on the
outside. A flash of the light showed a door corresponding with the
fireplace of the upper landing, and this door not being locked, we
entered a large room, rather dimly lighted by strongly barred windows
that gave into a blind courtyard, of which there had been no
indication heretofore, either outside or inside the castle. Broken
glass crunched under our feet, and I saw that the floor was strewn
with wine bottles whose necks had been snapped off to save the pulling
of the cork. On a mattress at the farther end of the room lay a man
with gray hair, and shaggy, unkempt iron-gray beard. He seemed either
asleep or dead, but when I turned my electric light full on his face
he proved to be still alive, for he rubbed his eyes languidly, and
groaned, rather than spoke:--

'Is that you at last, you beast of a butler? Bring me something to
eat, in Heaven's name!'

I shook him wider awake. He seemed to be drowsed with drink, and was
fearfully emaciated. When I got him on his feet, I noticed then the
deformity that characterised one of them. We assisted him through the
aperture, and down into the dining-room, where he cried out
continually for something to eat, but when we placed food before him,
he could scarcely touch it. He became more like a human being when he
had drunk two glasses of wine, and I saw at once he was not as old as
his gray hair seemed to indicate. There was a haunted look in his
eyes, and he watched the door as if apprehensive.

'Where is that butler?' he asked at last.

'Dead,' I replied.

'Did I kill him?'

'No; he fell down the stairway and broke his neck.'

The man laughed harshly.

'Where is my father?'

'Who is your father?'

'Lord Rantremly.'

'He is dead also.'

'How came he to die?'

'He died from a stroke of paralysis on the morning the butler was
killed.'

The rescued man made no comment on this, but turned and ate a little
more of his food. Then he said to me:--

'Do you know a girl named Sophia Brooks?'

'Yes. For ten years she thought you dead.'

'Ten years! Good God, do you mean to say I've been in there only ten
years? Why, I'm an old man. I must be sixty at least.'

'No; you're not much over thirty.'

'Is Sophia--' He stopped, and the haunted look came into his eyes
again.

'No. She is all right, and she is here.'