“No, I’d rather wait for father,” returned the girl, looking a little flushed, for some strange and totally unfamiliar ideas had recently floated into her brain and caused some incomprehensible flutterings of the heart to which hitherto she had been a stranger.

Mindful of his father’s injunctions, however, Nigel had been particularly careful to avoid increasing these flutterings.

In a few minutes the hermit came up.  “Ah!  Winnie,” he said, “there has been dire devastation here.  Perhaps inside things may look better.  Come, take my hand and don’t be afraid.  The floor is level and your eyes will soon get accustomed to the dim light.”

“I’s afeared, massa,” remarked Moses, as they entered the cavern, “dat your sun-lights won’t be wu’th much now.”

“You are right, lad.  Go on before us and light the lamps if they are not broken.”

It was found, as they had expected, that, the only light which penetrated the cavern was that which entered by the cave’s mouth, which of course was very feeble.

Presently, to Winnie’s surprise, Moses was seen issuing from the kitchen with a petroleum lamp in one hand, the brilliant light of which not only glittered on his expressive black visage but sent a ruddy glare all over the cavern.

Van der Kemp seemed to watch his daughter intently as she gazed in a bewildered way around.  There was a puzzled look as well as mere surprise in her pretty face.

“Father,” she said earnestly, “you have spoken more than once of living as if in a dream.  Perhaps you will wonder when I tell you that I experience something of that sort now.  Strange though this place seems, I have an unaccountable feeling that it is not absolutely new to me—­that I have seen it before.”

“I do not wonder, dear one,” he replied, “for the drawings that surround this chamber were the handiwork of your dear mother, and they decorated the walls of your own nursery when you were a little child at your mother’s knee.  For over ten long years they have surrounded me and kept your faces fresh in my memory—­though, truth to tell, it needed no such reminders to do that.  Come, let us examine them.”

It was pleasant to see the earnest face of Winnie as she half-recognised and strove to recall the memories of early childhood in that singular cavern.  It was also a sight worth seeing—­the countenance of Nigel, as well as that of the hermit, while they watched and admired her eager, puzzled play of feature, and it was the most amazing sight of all to see the all but superhuman joy of Moses as he held the lamp and listened to facts regarding the past of his beloved master which were quite new to him—­for the hermit spoke as openly about his past domestic affairs as if he and Winnie had been quite alone.

“He either forgets that we are present, or counts us as part of his family,” thought Nigel with a feeling of satisfaction.

“What a dear comoonicative man!” thought Moses, with unconcealed pleasure.