s and passages. Leading from the
cemetery is just the sort of passage that you and I need at this time.
Ah, here it is, and luckily it's empty!"

They had crossed the narrow street beyond the cemetery, and were looking
into a dark tunnel between two low stone houses. No one was in sight.
Lannes stepped without hesitation into the tunnel.

"Keep with me," he said, repeating his injunction, "and we'll soon be
under shelter."

His manner was so cheerful, so confident that John instinctively
believed him, and walked boldly by his side into the well of darkness.
But as his eyes grew used to it he made out the walls crumbling with age
and dripping with damp. Then the sound of heavy feet came thundering
down the passage.

"Some one leading a horse," whispered Lannes. "There's a stable on our
right. It's nothing. Seem not to notice as you pass."

The thunder of the feet, magnified in the confined space, increased, and
presently John saw a boy leading one of those huge-footed horses, used
for draft in Europe. The animal stepped slowly and heavily, and the boy
was half asleep. John and Philip, hovering in the shadow of the wall,
passed him so lightly that doubtless he was not conscious of their
presence.

The Frenchman turned into a tributary alley, narrower and darker than
the other, and Lannes knocked at a heavy oaken doorway, before which a
small lantern cast a dim light. John had good eyes, and accustomed to
the heavy shadows, he saw fairly well.

He concealed an imaginative temperament under a quiet manner, and he was
now really back in the Middle Ages. It must have been at least four or
five hundred years since people lived up little alleys like this. And
the door with its heavy iron bands, the shuttered window above it, and
the dim lantern that lighted the passage could belong only to long ago.
The house and its neighbors seemed to have been built as much for
defense as for habitation.

Lannes knocked again, and then John heard inside the soft tread of feet,
and the lifting of heavy bars. It was another mediaeval touch, and he
swung yet further back into the past. The door was opened slightly and
the face of an elderly woman appeared at the crevice.

"It's Philip Lannes with a friend, Mother Krochburg," said the young
Frenchman in a whisper, "and friend as you've often been to me I never
needed the friendship of you and your house more than I do now."

She said something in German and opened the door wider. Lan