t to
insert the spade where the old timbers had started, while still keeping
them apart, but this once done I could ply both implements together.
There was no key-hole to the trap, only the time-eaten ring and a pair
of hinges like prison bars; it could but be bolted underneath; and yet
how those old bolts and that wood of ages clung together! It was only by
getting the pick into the gap made by the spade, and prizing with each
in turn and both at once, that I eventually achieved my purpose. I heard
the bolt tinkle on hard ground beneath, and next moment saw it lying at
the bottom of a round bricked hole.

All this must have occupied far fewer minutes than it has taken to
describe; for Delavoye had not returned to peer with me into a well
which could never have been meant for water. It had neither the width
nor the depth of ordinary wells; an old ladder stood against one side,
and on the other the high sun shone clean down into the mouth of a
palpable tunnel. It opened in the direction of the horse-chestnuts, and
I was in it next moment. The air was intolerably stale without being
actually foul; a match burnt well enough to reveal a horseshoe passage
down which a man of medium stature might have walked upright. It was
bricked like the well, and spattered with some repulsive growth that
gave me a clammy daub before I realised the dimensions. I had struck a
second match on my trousers, and it had gone out as if by magic, when
Delavoye hailed me in high excitement from the lawn above.

He was less excited than I expected on hearing my experience; and he
only joined me for a minute before luncheon, which he insisted on our
still taking, to keep the servants in the dark. But it was a very
brilliant eye that he kept upon the Dutch chairs through the open
window, and he was full enough of plans and explanations. Of course we
must explore the passage, but we would give the bad air a chance of
getting out first. He spoke of some Turkish summer-house, or pavilion,
mentioned in certain annals of Witching Hill, that he had skimmed for
his amusement in the local Free Library. There was no such structure to
be seen from any point of vantage that he had discovered; possibly this
was its site; and the floor which had fallen in might have been a false
basement, purposely intended to conceal the trap-door, or else built
over it by some unworthy successor of the great gay lord.

"He was just the sort of old sportsman to have a way of hi