l you, Prince Robin Goodfellow."

Bobby beamed. "But I never kiss her _there!_"

"I shall be ten thousand times obliged, your Highness, if you will
deliver it in the usual place."

"I'll do it!" almost shouted the Prince. Then he clapped his hand over
his mouth and looked, pop-eyed with apprehension, toward the nurse.

"Then, good-bye and God bless you," said Truxton. "I must be off. Your
Uncle Jack is waiting for me, up there in the hills."

Bobby's eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Mr. King, please give him my love
and make him hurry back. I--I need him awful!"

Truxton found Mr. Hobbs in a state bordering on collapse.

"I say, Mr. King, it's all right to say we'll go, but how the deuce are
we to do it? My word, there's no more chance of getting out of the--"

"Listen, Hobbs: we're going to swim out," said Truxton. He was engaged
in stuffing food into a knapsack. Colonel Quinnox and Haddan had been
listening to Hobbs's lamentations for half an hour, in King's room.

"Swim? Oh, I say! By hokey, he's gone clean daffy!" Hobbs was eyeing him
with alarm. The others looked hard at the speaker, scenting a joke.

"Not yet, Hobbs. Later on, perhaps. I had occasion to make a short tour
of investigation this afternoon. Doubtless, gentlemen, you know where
the water-gate is, back of the Castle. Well, I've looked it over--and
under, I might say. Hobbs, you and I will sneak under those slippery old
gates like a couple of eels. I forgot to ask if you can swim."

"To be sure I can. _Under_ the gates? My word!"

"Simple as rolling off a log," said Truxton carelessly. "The Cascades
and Basin of Venus run out through the gate. There is a space of at
least a foot below the bottom of the gate, which hasn't been opened in
fifty years, I'm told. A good swimmer can wriggle through, d'ye see?
That lets him out into the little canal that connects with the river.
Then--"

"I see!" cried Quinnox. "It can be done! No one will be watching at that
point."

The sky was overcast, the night as black as ebony. The four men left the
officers' quarters at one o'clock, making their way to the historic old
gate in the glen below the Castle. Arriving at the wall, Truxton briefly
whispered his plans.

"You remember, Colonel Quinnox, that the stream is four or five feet
deep here at the gate. The current has washed a deeper channel under the
iron-bound timbers. The gates are perhaps two feet thick. For something
like seven or eight feet from the b