Words very similar to these were being bandied about in fierce undertones by the men who had accompanied Gaston, and who had never seen such a chamber as this before.  Great would have been their satisfaction to let its owner taste something of the agony he had too often inflicted upon helpless victims thrown into his power.  But this being out of the question, the next matter was the rescue of the captive they had come to save; and they looked eagerly at their young leader to know what was the next step to be taken.

Gaston was searching for the wheel by which the mechanism could be set in motion which would enable him to reach his brother’s prison house.  It was easily found from the description given him by Constanza.  He set his men to work to turn the wheel, and at once became aware of the groaning and grating sound that attends the motion of clumsy machinery.  Gazing eagerly up into the dun roof above him, he saw slowly descending a portion of the stonework of which it was formed.  It was a clever enough contrivance for those unskilled days, and showed a considerable ingenuity on the part of some owner of the Castle of Saut.

When the great slab had descended to the floor below, Gaston stepped upon it, Roger placing himself at his side, and with a brief word to his men to reverse the action of the wheel, and to lower the slab again a few minutes later, he prepared for his strange passage upwards to his brother’s lonely cell.

Roger held a lantern in his hand, and the faces of the pair were full of anxious expectation.  Suppose Raymond had been removed from that upper prison?  Suppose he had succumbed either to the cruelty of his foes or to the fever resulting from his injuries received on the day of the battle?

A hundred fears possessed Gaston’s soul as the strange transit through the air was being accomplished —­ a transit so strange that he felt as though he must surely be dreaming.  But there was only one thing to be done —­ to persevere in the quest, and trust to the Holy Saints and the loving mercy of Blessed Mary’s Son to grant him success in this his endeavour.

Up, up into the darkness of the vaulted roof he passed, and then a yawning hole above their heads, which looked too small to admit the passage of the slab upon which they stood, swallowed them up, and they found themselves passing upwards through a shaft which only just admitted the block upon which they stood.  Up and up they went, and now the creaking sound grew louder, and the motion grew perceptibly slower.  They were no longer in a narrow shaft; a black space opened before their eyes.  The motion ceased altogether with a grinding sensation and a jerk, and out of the darkness of a wider space, pitchy dark to their eyes, came the sound of a familiar voice.

“Gaston —­ Brother!”

Gaston sprang forward into the darkness, heedless of all but the sound of that voice.  The next moment he was clasping his brother in his arms, his own emotion so great that he dared not trust his voice to speak; whilst Raymond, holding him fast in a passionate clasp, whispered in his ear a breathless question.