scarlet cloak over her head. Strong-booted, and with warm
gloves, she stood for a moment at her door to listen, and finding all
quiet, she slowly descended the stairs and gained the hall. She started
affrighted as she entered, thinking there was some one seated at the table,
but she rallied in an instant, as she saw it was only the loose horseman's
coat or cloak of the chief constable, which, lined with red, and with the
gold-laced cap beside it, made up the delusion that alarmed her.

It was not an easy task to withdraw the heavy bolts and bars that secured
the massive door, and even to turn the heavy key in the lock required an
effort; but she succeeded at length, and issued forth into the open.

'How I hope he has not come! how I pray he has not ventured!' said she to
herself as she walked along. 'Leave-takings are sad things, and why incur
one so full of peril and misery too? When I wrote to him, of course I knew
nothing of his danger, and it is exactly his danger will make him come!'
She knew of others to whom such reasonings would not have applied, and a
scornful shake of the head showed that she would not think of them at such
a moment. The sound of her own footsteps on the crisp ground made her once
or twice believe she heard some one coming, and as she stopped to listen,
the strong beating of her heart could be counted. It was not fear--at least
not fear in the sense of a personal danger--it was that high tension which
great anxiety lends to the nerves, exalting vitality to a state in which a
sensation is as powerful as a material influence.

She ascended the steps of the little terraced mound of the rendezvous one
by one, overwhelmed almost to fainting by some imagined analogy with the
scaffold, which might be the fate of him she was going to meet.

He was standing under a tree, his arms crossed on his breast, as she came
up. The moment she appeared, he rushed to meet her, and throwing himself on
one knee, he seized her hand and kissed it.

'Do you know your danger in being here?' she asked, as she surrendered her
hand to his grasp.

'I know it all, and this moment repays it tenfold.'

'You cannot know the full extent of the peril; you cannot know that Captain
Curtis and his people are in the castle at this moment, that they are in
full cry after you, and that every avenue to this spot is watched and
guarded.'

'What care I! Have I not this?' And he covered her hand with kisses.

'Every moment that yo