close to me, saying:

'Drink this, madame, and let us begone. All is ready.'

I let her put her arm under my head and raise me, and pour something
down my throat. All the time she kept talking in a quiet, measured
voice, unlike her own, so dry and authoritative; she told me that a
suit of her clothes lay ready for me, that she herself was as much
disguised as the circumstances permitted her to be, that what
provisions I had left from my supper were stowed away in her pockets,
and so she went on, dwelling on little details of the most commonplace
description, but never alluding for an instant to the fearful cause why
flight was necessary. I made no inquiry as to how she knew, or what she
knew. I never asked her either then or afterwards, I could not bear
it--we kept our dreadful secret close. But I suppose she must have been
in the dressing-room adjoining, and heard all.

In fact, I dared not speak even to her, as if there were anything
beyond the most common event in life in our preparing thus to leave the
house of blood by stealth in the dead of night. She gave me
directions--short condensed directions, without reasons--just as you do
to a child; and like a child I obeyed her. She went often to the door
and listened; and often, too, she went to the window, and looked
anxiously out. For me, I saw nothing but her, and I dared not let my
eyes wander from her for a minute; and I heard nothing in the deep
midnight silence but her soft movements, and the heavy beating of my
own heart. At last she took my hand, and led me in the dark, through
the salon, once more into the terrible gallery, where across the black
darkness the windows admitted pale sheeted ghosts of light upon the
floor. Clinging to her I went; unquestioning--for she was human
sympathy to me after the isolation of my unspeakable terror. On we
went, turning to the left instead of to the right, past my suite of
sitting-rooms where the gilding was red with blood, into that unknown
wing of the castle that fronted the main road lying parallel far below.
She guided me along the basement passages to which we had now
descended, until we came to a little open door, through which the air
blew chill and cold, bringing for the first time a sensation of life to
me. The door led into a kind of cellar, through which we groped our way
to an opening like window, but which, instead of being glazed, was only
fenced with iron bars, two of which were loose, as Amante evidently