tion were forbidden.

Turning at once to the parapet of the terrace, he mounted, but paused a
moment, as he endeavoured to gauge the distance of the opposite wall,
and gazed into the black gulf below. Bacri had told him that the space
was six feet. In the darkness that now prevailed it appeared twenty.
He would have ventured it in the circumstances had it been sixty!

Collecting all his energies and courage, he made a bound forward that
might have roused the envy of an acrobat, and cleared not only the space
between but the parapet beyond, coming down with an awful crash into the
midst of a certain box-garden, which was the special pride of the owner
of the mansion.

Poor Mariano leaped up in horror, and listened with dread, but suddenly
remembering that he now stood on what Bacri had termed friendly ground,
he recovered self-possession and sought for the door on the roof.
Finding it after some trouble, he knocked gently.

It was opened much sooner and more violently than he had anticipated,
and a tall man springing out seized him by the throat in a grasp like a
vice, and held a gleaming dagger to his breast.

In other circumstances Mariano would certainly have engaged in a
struggle for the dagger, but remembering Angela and the Jew's warning,
he gave back, and said in French, as well as the vice-like grip would
allow--

"A friend."

"Truly," replied the man gruffly, in Lingua Franca, "thy knock might
imply friendship, but thine appearance here at such an hour requires
more explanation than a mere assurance."

"Remove your hand and you shall have it," replied the youth, somewhat
angrily. "Dost suppose that if I had been other than a friend I would
not have ere now flung thee headlong from thine own terrace?"

"Speak quickly, then," returned the man, relaxing his hold a little.

"This ring," said the youth.

"Ha! Enough, a sure token," interrupted the Jew, in a low friendly
tone, on seeing the ring, at the same time leading Mariano within the
doorway. "What wouldst thou?"

"Nothing more than to be shown the nearest way to the street."

"That is soon done--follow me."

In a few minutes Mariano found himself in a narrow street, down which,
after lighting his lantern and thanking the Jew, he proceeded at a rapid
pace.

In the intricacies of that curious old town the youth would certainly
have lost himself, but for the fact that it was built, as we have said,
on the slope of a hill, so that all he had