ificant: the
torture-chamber... Poor, dear friend!... Between the staircase and the
torture-chamber, two doors. Between those two doors, a recess in which
the three brothers obviously sit, gun in hand."

"So it is impossible for you to get in that way without being seen."

"Impossible... unless I come from above, by the story that has fallen
in, and look for a means of entrance through the ceiling... But that is
very risky..."

He continued to turn the pages of the book. Clarisse asked:

"Is there no window to the room?"

"Yes," he said. "From below, from the river--I have just been there--you
can see a little opening, which is also marked on the plan. But it is
fifty yards up, sheer; and even then the rock overhangs the water. So
that again is out of the question."

He glanced through a few pages of the book. The title of one chapter
struck him: The Lovers' Towers. He read the opening lines:

"In the old days, the donjon was known to the people of the
neighbourhood as the Lovers' Tower, in memory of a fatal tragedy
that marked it in the Middle Ages. The Comte de Mortepierre,
having received proofs of his wife's faithlessness, imprisoned
her in the torture-chamber, where she spent twenty years. One
night, her lover, the Sire de Tancarville, with reckless courage,
set up a ladder in the river and then clambered up the face of
the cliff till he came to the window of the room. After filing
the bars, he succeeded in releasing the woman he loved and
bringing her down with him by means of a rope. They both reached
the top of the ladder, which was watched by his friends, when a
shot was fired from the patrol-path and hit the man in the
shoulder. The two lovers were hurled into space...."

There was a pause, after he had read this, a long pause during which
each of them drew a mental picture of the tragic escape. So, three or
four centuries earlier, a man, risking his life, had attempted that
surprising feat and would have succeeded but for the vigilance of some
sentry who heard the noise. A man had ventured! A man had dared! A man
done it!

Lupin raised his eyes to Clarisse. She was looking at him... with such a
desperate, such a beseeching look! The look of a mother who demanded the
impossible and who would have sacrificed anything to save her son.

"Masher," he said, "get a strong rope, but very slender, so that I
can roll it round my waist, and very long: fifty or sixty yards. You,
Growler, go