here," he said.
"This archway hadn't been opened for ages. This, of course, is the very
lowest story of the Keep, and half beneath the level of the ground
outside. Its roof has gone, like all the rest, but as you see, something
else has supplied its place. Hold up your lantern, Marris!"

The other men looked up and saw what the Squire meant. Across the tower,
at a height of some fifteen or twenty feet from the floor, Nature, left
unchecked, had thrown a ceiling of green stuff. Bramble, ivy, and other
spreading and climbing plants had, in the course of years, made a
complete network from wall to wall. In places it was so thick that no
light could be seen through it from beneath; in other places it was thin
and glimpses of the sky could be seen from above the grey, tunnel-like
walls. And in one of those places, close to the walls, there was a
distinct gap, jagged and irregular, as if some heavy mass had recently
plunged through the screen of leaf and branch from the heights above, and
beneath this the startled searchers saw the body, lying beside a heap of
stones and earth in the unmistakable stillness of death.

"You see how it must have happened," whispered Greyle, as they all bent
round the dead man. "He must have fallen from the very top of the
Keep--from the parapet, in fact--and plunged through this mass of green
stuff above us. If he had hit that where it's so thick--there!--it might
have broken his fall, but, you see, he struck it at the very thinnest
part, and being a big and heavyish man, of course, he'd crash right
through it. Now of course, when we examined the Keep on Monday morning,
it never struck us that there might be something down here--if you go up
the turret stairs to the top and look down on this mass of green stuff
from the very top, you'll see that it looks undisturbed; there's scarcely
anything to show that he fell through it, from up there. But--he did!"

"Whose notion was it that he might be found here?" asked Copplestone.

"Chatfield's," replied the Squire. "Chatfield's. He and I were up at the
top there, and he suddenly suggested that Oliver might have fallen from
the parapet and be lying embedded in that mass of green stuff beneath. We
didn't know then--even Chatfield didn't know--that there was this empty
space beneath the green stuff. But when we came to go into it, we found
there was, so we had that archway cleared of all the stone and rubbish
and of course we found him."

"The body'll