waiting, perhaps sitting silent in the dark,
perhaps lying down for an hour or two of sleep before the fateful hour
of the high tide. Cicely heard her father, below, barring the door,
putting out the candles, making ready for a night that would surely
bring him no sleep. Presently he passed her door, glanced inside, and
came in to stand for a minute beside her fire. How worn he had grown
to look just within the space of this last week! He said scarcely a
word; it was as though his unhappiness merely craved company and
shrank from the knowledge of what the night might bring.

At last he said, "You should be in bed. Good night, my dear."

As he went out he turned to look back at her with a glance of haggard,
helpless misery. It was as though he said:

"My pride has bound and stifled me. I cannot speak a word to stop him,
but won't you, can't you, persuade him, somehow, not to go?"

Very carefully and without a sound, Cicely rose and went to her
closet, to take down her warm fur cloak. She had realized, in the
moment of seeing her father's pleading look, that she had a plan, one
that had been in her mind ever since the day that she had talked with
Ben Barton. What she had really lacked was courage to put it into
execution. Yet now, as she drew the cloak about her and pulled down
her hood, her hands did not even tremble, nor did her determination
falter. The house was absolutely still as she stole noiselessly down
the stairs and slipped out of the door.

For a girl who had almost never been allowed upon the street alone,
the wintry night should have been full of terrors, but to Cicely they
meant nothing. As she ran down the steep High Street with the gale
blustering behind her, she saw things that she had never believed
existed--a burly waterman quarreling with his wife behind a dirty
lighted window, the open door of a tavern showing a candle-lit room
with a crowd of shouting sailors drinking within, a furtive black
shadow that skulked into an alleyway and remained there, silent and
hidden, as she passed.

She reached the wharves at last, where the wind was stronger and where
the waves slapped and dashed against the barnacled piles, throwing
their spray against the windows of the locked warehouses. Even now she
did not hesitate. She ran, a gray, flitting form, across the open
space at the head of the wharf and disappeared.

There was a wait of a few minutes, then came the dip of oars through
the dark and the sound