e, saying,--

"Drink this, madame, and let us begone. All is ready."

I let her put her arm under my head and raise me, and pour something
down my throat. All the time she kept talking in a quiet, measured
voice, unlike her own, so dry and authoritative; she told me that a suit
of her clothes lay ready for me, that she herself was as much disguised
as the circumstances permitted her to be, that what provisions I had
left from my supper were stowed away in her pockets, and so she went
on, dwelling on little details of the most commonplace description,
but never alluding for an instant to the fearful cause why flight was
necessary. I made no inquiry as to how she knew, or what she knew. I
never asked her either then or afterwards, I could not bear it--we kept
our dreadful secret close. But I suppose she must have been in the
dressing-room adjoining, and heard all.

In fact, I dared not speak even to her, as if there were anything beyond
the most common event in life in our preparing thus to leave the house
of blood by stealth in the dead of night. She gave me directions--short
condensed directions, without reasons--just as you do to a child; and
like a child I obeyed her. She went often to the door and listened; and
often, too, she went to the window, and looked anxiously out. For me, I
saw nothing but her, and I dared not let my eyes wander from her for a
minute; and I heard nothing in the deep midnight silence but her soft
movements, and the heavy beating of my own heart. At last she took my
hand, and led me in the dark, through the salon, once more into the
terrible gallery, where across the black darkness the windows admitted
pale sheeted ghosts of light upon the floor. Clinging to her I went;
unquestioning--for she was human sympathy to me after the isolation of
my unspeakable terror. On we went, turning to the left instead of to
the right, past my suite of sitting-rooms where the gilding was red
with blood, into that unknown wing of the castle that fronted the main
road lying parallel far below. She guided me along the basement passages
to which we had now descended, until we came to a little open door,
through which the air blew chill and cold, bringing for the first time
a sensation of life to me. The door led into a kind of cellar, through
which we groped our way to an opening like a window, but which, instead
of being glazed, was only fenced with iron bars, two of which were
loose, as Amante evidently knew, fo