By now we are running down the passage, and this is what the light from the lamp falls on. The door of rock is slowly closing down; it is not three feet from the floor. Near it struggle. Foulata and Gagool. The red blood of the former runs to her knees but still the brave girl holds the old witch, who fights like a wildcat. Ah! she is free! Foulata fails, and Gagool throws herself on the ground, to twist. herself like a snake through the crack of the closing stone, She is under - ah, God! too late! too late! The stone nips her, and she yells in agony. Down, down, it comes, all the thirty tons of it, slowly pressing her old body against the rock below. Shriek upon shriek, such as we never heard, then a long, sickening crunch, and the door was shut just as we, rushing down the passage, hurled ourselves against it. It was all done in four seconds.

Then we turned to Foulata. The poor girl was stabbed in the body, and could not, I saw, live long.

"Ah! Bougwan, I die!" gasped the beautiful creature. "She crept out - Gagool; I did not see her, I was faint - and the door began to fall; then she came back, and was looking up the path - and I saw her come in through the slowly falling door, and caught her and held her, and she stabbed me, and I die, Bougwan.

"Poor girl! poor girl!" Good cried; and then, as he could do nothing else, he fell to kissing her.

"Bougwan," she said, after a pause, "is Macumazahn there? it grows so dark, I cannot see."

"Here I am, Foulata."

"Macumazahn, be my tongue for a moment, I pray thee, for Bougwan cannot understand me, and before I go into the darkness - I would speak a word."

"Say on, Foulata, I will render it."

"Say to my lord, Bougwan, that - I love him, and that I am glad to die because I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as me, for the sun cannot mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black.

"Say that at times I have felt as though there were a bird in my bosom, which would one day fly hence and sing elsewhere; even now, though I cannot lift my hand, and my brain grows cold, I do not feel as though my heart were dying; it is so full of love that could live a thousand years, and yet be young. Say that if I live again, mayhap I shall see him in the stars, and that - I will search them all, though perchance I should there still be black and he would - still be white. Say - nay, Macumazahn, say no more, save that I love-Oh, hold me closer, Bougwan, I cannot feel thine arms - oh! oh!"

"She is dead - -she is dead!" said Good, rising in grief, the tears running down his honest face.

"You need not let that trouble you, old fellow," said Sir Henry.

"Eh!" said Good; "what do you mean?"

"I mean that you will soon be in a position to join her. Man, don't you see that we are buried alive?"

Until Sir Henry uttered these words, I do not think the full horror of what had happened had come home to us, preoccupied as we were with the sight of poor Foulata's end. But now we understood. The ponderous mass of rock had closed, probably forever, for the only brain which knew its secret was crushed to powder beneath it. This was a door that none could hope to force with anything short of dynamite in large quantities. And we were the wrong side of it!

For a few minutes we stood horrified there over the corpse of Foulata. All the manhood seemed to have gone out of us. The first shock of this idea of the slow and miserable end that awaited us was overpowering. We saw it all now; that fiend, Gagool, had planned this snare for us from the first. It would have been just the jest that her evil mind would have rejoiced in, the idea; of the three white men, whom, for some. reason of her own, she had always hated, slowly perishing of thirst am hunger in the company of the