p
the ropes extended, contrivances which had been made to my order,
resembling stair rods with forks and an arrangement of screws by which
they could be disconnected into pieces convenient for the pocket.

"They're here, sir," he exclaimed, slapping his breast.

"Well, we proceed thus: The bull's-eye must be cautiously lighted and
darkened. We have then to steal noiselessly to abreast of the window
on the left of the house and flash the lantern. This will be answered
by the young lady striking a match at the window."

"Won't the scraping of the lucifer be heard?" inquired Caudel.

"No, Miss Bellassys writes to me that no one sleeps within several
corridors of that room."

"Well, and then I think you said, sir," observed Caudel, "that the
young lady'll slip out on to the balcony, and lower away a small length
of line to which this here ladder," he said, giving his breast a thump,
"is to be bent on, she hauling of it up?"

"Quite right," said I; "you must help her to descend whilst I hold the
ladder taut at the foot of it. No fear of the ropes breaking, I hope?"

"Lord love 'ee," he said heartily, "it's brand new rattline-stuff,
strong enough to hoist the mainmast out of a first-rate."

By this time we had gained the top of the Grande Rue. Before us
stretched an open space dark with lines of trees; at long intervals the
gleam of an oil lamp dotted that space of gloom; on our right lay the
dusky mass of the rampart walls, the yawning gateway dully illuminated
by the trembling flame of a lantern into a picture which carried the
imagination back into heroic times, when elopements were exceedingly
common, when gallant knights were to be met with galloping away with
women of beauty and distinction clinging to them, when the midnight air
was vocal with guitars, and nearly every other darkling lattice framed
some sweet, pale, listening face.

"Which'll be the road, sir?" broke in Caudel's tempestuous voice.

I had explored the district that afternoon, had observed all that was
necessary, and discovered that the safest, if not the shortest, way to
the Rue de Maquetra where my sweetheart, Grace Bellassys, was at
school, lay through the Haute Ville or Upper Town as the English called
it. The streets were utterly deserted; not so much as a cat stirred.
One motionless figure we passed, hard by the Cathedral--a policeman or
gendarme--he might have been a statue; it was like pacing the streets
of a town that had been sa