od gazing at
him with a pitiful terror in her eyes.

"What is to be done! Is there no other way!" he said, half to himself.
"Mon Dieu, Helene, how beautiful you are! Ah, what is that? Listen!"

His ears, quicker than hers, had caught steps and a rustling sound in
the passage that ended at the chapel door.

"Dear--go back to your room," he said. "They must not find you here. We
shall meet again--Good-night, my own!"

He was gone. The bewildered girl looked after him silently, and he was
across the floor, on the window-sill, disappearing hand over head down
his ladder of old twisted ivy stems, before she realised anything. Then,
not the least aware that some one was knocking at her bedroom door in
the passage, shaking the latch, calling her name, she flew after him to
the window and leaned out, crying to him low and wildly, "Angelot, come
back, come back! Why did you go? Ah, don't leave me! Help me to climb
down, too,--please, please, darling!"

Angelot was out of sight, though not out of hearing. Forty feet of thick
ivy and knotted stems, shelter of generations of owls, stretched between
the chapel window and the moat's green floor; ivy two centuries old, the
happy hunting-ground of many a lad of Lancilly and La Mariniere. But
that night, perhaps, the hospitable old tree reached the most romantic
point of its history.

Helene stretched down eager hands among the thick leaves.

"Angelot! Angelot!"

She heard nothing but the rustling down below, saw nothing but the thick
leaves under the stars, though somebody had opened the chapel door, and
though her treacherous candle, throwing a square of light upon the dark
trees opposite, showed not only her own imploring shadow, but that of a
tall figure stepping up behind her. In another moment her arm was seized
in a grasp by no means gentle, and she turned round with a scream to
face Madame de Sainfoy.

Her cry might have stopped Angelot in his swift descent and brought him
to the window again, but as he neared the ground he saw that some one
was waiting for him, some one standing on the flat grass, under the
light of such stars as shone down into the moat, gazing with fixed
gravity at the window from which Helene was leaning.

Angelot's light spring to the ground brought him within a couple of
yards of the motionless figure, and his white face flushed red when he
saw that it was Helene's father. The few moments during which he faced
Comte Herve silently were the wors