interests and honour, would guard Ortensia as jealously as the dragon
guarded the Golden Fleece. Moreover, as to getting in by the window, a
man would first have to get access to the walled garden below, which
Pignaver regarded as another impossibility, for the wall was high, he
himself kept the key of the postern that opened on the canal, and the
gardener entered through the house.

Nevertheless Stradella was standing in the loggia at eleven o'clock;
Ortensia was sure he was there, and at midnight she was still lying on
her back, staring up at the canopy, with outstretched hands that
clutched the edges of the bed on each side. Her idea of what was
possible was quite different from her uncle's; the one thing which
seemed to her out of the question was that she should lie where she was
much longer, and she only succeeded by giving herself the illusion that
her own hands held her down by main force. By and by they would be
tired, she supposed, and then she would have to go to him.

She held fast and listened, hoping to hear the bells again, as if an
hour could slip by as in a moment while she was awake; and suddenly she
started, and one hand left its hold, for she heard a noise at her own
window, a sharp tap, followed by another and another. Then there came a
sharp rattling, and she knew that it was only raining, and tried to
laugh at herself. The first big drops of the squall had struck the panes
like little pebbles. Her hand went down to the edge of the bed again and
clutched the mattress desperately, while she listened.

He was in the loggia, and the rain was driving in upon him as it was
driving against her window. He would not move; he would wait there in
the wet till dawn, for he had said so and she believed him. It was hard
to hold herself down now, knowing that he was being wet through. He must
have left his cloak behind, too, for he could not have been able to
climb if hampered by the folds.

It was pouring now, and there was wind with the rain, since otherwise it
could not have made such a noise against the glass. She had often stood
inside the closed window of the sitting-room when it was raining from
the same quarter, and she had seen how the gusts drove the water in
sheets against the panes, till it ran down and made a river along the
loggia and boiled at the grated gutter-sinks through which it ran off.
He was perhaps nearly up to his ankles in the little flood by this time,
but he would not go away for t