teaching me
the code and method; they still withheld from me rigidly the fact or
political secret, or whatever it was that was the mainspring of their
united action.

When I got home I wrote down, whilst it was fresh in my memory, all they
told me. This script I studied until I had it so thoroughly by heart
that I _could_ not forget it. Then I burned the paper. However, there
is now one gain at least: with my semaphore I can send through the Blue
Mountains from side to side, with expedition, secrecy, and exactness, a
message comprehensible to all.

RUPERT'S JOURNAL--_Continued_.

_June_ 6, 1907.

Last night I had a new experience of my Lady of the Shroud--in so far as
form was concerned, at any rate. I was in bed, and just falling asleep,
when I heard a queer kind of scratching at the glass door of the terrace.
I listened acutely, my heart beating hard. The sound seemed to come from
low down, close to the floor. I jumped out of bed, ran to the window,
and, pulling aside the heavy curtains, looked out.

The garden looked, as usual, ghostly in the moonlight, but there was not
the faintest sign of movement anywhere, and no one was on or near the
terrace. I looked eagerly down to where the sound had seemed to come
from.

There, just inside the glass door, as though it had been pushed under the
door, lay a paper closely folded in several laps. I picked it up and
opened it. I was all in a tumult, for my heart told me whence it came.
Inside was written in English, in a large, sprawling hand, such as might
be from an English child of seven or eight:

"Meet me at the Flagstaff on the Rock!"

I knew the place, of course. On the farthermost point of the rock on
which the Castle stands is set a high flagstaff, whereon in old time the
banner of the Vissarion family flew. At some far-off time, when the
Castle had been liable to attack, this point had been strongly fortified.
Indeed, in the days when the bow was a martial weapon it must have been
quite impregnable.

A covered gallery, with loopholes for arrows, had been cut in the solid
rock, running right round the point, quite surrounding the flagstaff and
the great boss of rock on whose centre it was reared. A narrow
drawbridge of immense strength had connected--in peaceful times, and
still remained--the outer point of rock with an entrance formed in the
outer wall, and guarded with flanking to