and draw it up again quickly,
then get back as you came, shut the door after you, and take down the
steps before you join your mother. But you must do something with the
rope."

"Hide it?" said Frank.

"It would be found, and I don't want you or your mother to have the
credit of helping me to escape."

"Burn it in the kitchen fire?"

"There will not be time. They will search the house. I cannot propose
a way, only do something with it. Now good-bye."

"Good-bye?" faltered Frank.

"Yes, while I can speak to you. Quick! a soldier's good-bye. That will
do; now out after me."

Sir Robert's "good-bye" was a firm grip of his son's hand, and then he
crept out on to the roof; Frank followed him, his heart throbbing with
excitement; and as he stepped out he could hear voices down below in the
garden beneath the drawing-room windows.

Frank shivered a little, for he felt sure that they would be seen
against the sky, in spite of their precaution of leaning toward the
sloping roof, and he fully expected to hear the report of muskets; but
the shiver was more due to excitement than fear.

"They would not be able to hit us on a night like this, while we are
moving," he said to himself; and with a strange feeling of wild
exhilaration, he followed the dark figure before him, climbing across
the low walls which separated house from house, and finding it easy
enough to walk along in the narrow path-like space of leaded roof, which
extended from the bottom of the slate slope to the low parapet with its
stone coping, beyond which nothing was visible but the tops of the trees
in the Park.

They must have passed over the roofs of twenty houses before Sir Robert
stopped; and, as Frank crept up close to him, he put his lips to the
boy's ear.

"It's a drop of ten feet to the next house," he said. "Must go down
from here."

A sensation of dread did now attack Frank, as he thought of the descent
of a heavy man by the frail rope. If it had been he who was to go down,
it would have been different, and he would have felt no hesitation.

Catching at his father's arm, he whispered:

"Are you sure that it will bear you?"

"Certain."

"But the chimney stack?" whispered Frank, as he could dimly make out
that his father was uncoiling the rope, and he could see no place that
would be suitable.

"Hist! This is better."

Sir Robert was now kneeling down, and after being puzzled for a few
moments, Frank then made out that his