er, and he could hear her quick hands padding about
in the dark. A moment later she had thrust up a hatch. He saw it led
to the open air, for the stars were above them.

He felt grateful for that open air, for the coolness, for the sense of
deliverance which came with even that comparative freedom.

"Don't stop!" she whispered. And he followed her across the slant of
the uneven roof. He was weak for want of breath. The girl had to
catch him and hold him for a moment.

"On the next roof you must take off your shoes," she warned him. "You
can rest then. But hurry--hurry!"

He gulped down the fresh air as he tore at his shoe laces, thrusting
each shoe in a side pocket as he started after her. For by this time
she was scrambling across the broken sloping roofs, as quick and agile
as a cat, dropping over ledges, climbing up barriers and across coping
tiles. Where she was leading him he had no remotest idea. She
reminded him of a cream-tinted monkey in the maddest of steeplechases.
He was glad when she came to a stop.

The town seemed to lay to their right. Before them were the scattered
lights of the harbor and the mild crescent of the outer bay. They
could see the white wheeling finger of some foreign gunboat as its
searchlight played back and forth in the darkness.

She sighed with weariness and dropped cross-legged down on the coping
tiles against which he leaned, regaining his breath. She squatted
there, cooingly, like a child exhausted with its evening games.

"I 'm dished!" she murmured, as she sat there breathing audibly through
the darkness. "I 'm dished for this coast!"

He sat down beside her, staring at the search-light. There seemed
something reassuring, something authoritative and comforting, in the
thought of it watching there in the darkness.

The girl touched him on the knee and then shifted her position on the
coping tiles, without rising to her feet.

"Come here!" she commanded. And when he was close beside her she
pointed with her thin white arm. "That's Saint Poalo there--you can
just make it out, up high, see. And those lights are the Boundary
Gate. And this sweep of lights below here is the _Praya_. Now look
where I 'm pointing. That's the Luiz Camoes lodging-house. You see
the second window with the light in it?"

"Yes, I see it."

"Well, Binhart 's inside that window."

"You know it?"

"I know it."

"So he 's there?" said Blake, staring at the vague square of l