Probably the length of time that elapsed (which seemed like an eternity to Elizabeth,) was, in reality, not more than half an hour before a ray of light greeted her eyes, coming through a ragged chink in the crumbling masonry of the heavy walls.
Creeping cautiously forward she put her eye to the crevice and looked eagerly into the inner room.
The scene she witnessed was well calculated to chill the blood of an able bodied man, but to a delicate woman, still trembling from the effects of her awful plunge into the river;--hampered by dripping garments and nearly frantic with the fear of momentary violence, the sight was more than doubly horrible.
The room was nothing more than a large vault or closet built into the solid walls, probably for no definite purpose, but so well adapted to its present use that one would think its designer must have foreseen its ultimate fate.
Several battered and smoking lanterns hung on nails, which had been wedged firmly between loose bricks in the decaying walls, their outlines appearing to her excited imagination not unlike the red eye balls and smoke begrimed faces of the score of beings upon whom their dismal glimmer fell.
This score of individuals, representing a class of monsters, born in the slime of cellars; nourished on the odors of decomposition and trained to accomplishments of vice and evil, were busy at the ghoulish work of robbing two human bodies, whose swollen and livid members plainly proclaimed them trophies from the river's unfailing supply.
Ragged females with bloated faces and keen eyes were squabbling like cats over the articles which had been removed from the dead woman's body, while the males cursed and struck at each other in a frantic struggle for the watch and jewels which the other water-soaked victim had worn.
The scene was horrible, pile upon pile of rubbish was heaped about the room, and one and all seemed interested in claiming and getting possession of as much plunder as they could, by fair means or foul.
Elizabeth plainly identified her rescuers who were among the most quarrelsome of the lot, but, even in her bewilderment, she noticed that there was no mention made of _their_ evenings work or of her body, which, of course, they supposed was safe in the recesses of that loathsome cellar.