his lamp lest it should attract attention, led the way
up-stairs and along the corridor. In the brown chamber the rope had been
made fast to the frame of an exceeding heavy and ancient bed. It had not
been detached, and Dick, taking the coil to the window, began to lower it
slowly and cautiously into the darkness of the night. Joan stood by; but
as the rope lengthened, and still Dick continued to pay it out, extreme
fear began to conquer her resolution.

"Dick," she said, "is it so deep? I may not essay it. I should
infallibly fall, good Dick."

It was just at the delicate moment of the operations that she spoke.
Dick started; the remainder of the coil slipped from his grasp, and the
end fell with a splash into the moat. Instantly, from the battlement
above, the voice of a sentinel cried, "Who goes?"

"A murrain!" cried Dick. "We are paid now! Down with you--take the
rope."

"I cannot," she cried, recoiling.

"An ye cannot, no more can I," said Shelton. "How can I swim the moat
without you? Do you desert me, then?"

"Dick," she gasped, "I cannot. The strength is gone from me."

"By the mass, then, we are all shent!" he shouted, stamping with his
foot; and then, hearing steps, he ran to the room door and sought to
close it.

Before he could shoot the bolt, strong arms were thrusting it back upon
him from the other side. He struggled for a second; then, feeling
himself overpowered, ran back to the window. The girl had fallen against
the wall in the embrasure of the window; she was more than half
insensible; and when he tried to raise her in his arms, her body was limp
and unresponsive.

At the same moment the men who had forced the door against him laid hold
upon him. The first he poinarded at a blow, and the others falling back
for a second in some disorder, he profited by the chance, bestrode the
window-sill, seized the cord in both hands, and let his body slip.

The cord was knotted, which made it the easier to descend; but so furious
was Dick's hurry, and so small his experience of such gymnastics, that he
span round and round in mid-air like a criminal upon a gibbet, and now
beat his head, and now bruised his hands, against the rugged stonework of
the wall. The air roared in his ears; he saw the stars overhead, and the
reflected stars below him in the moat, whirling like dead leaves before
the tempest. And then he lost hold, and fell, and soused head over ears
into the icy water.

When he