My heart beat faster with excitement as with my eye pressed tight to the peep-hole I followed every movement of my unconscious quarry.  Whistling cheerfully to himself, he stripped off the dark blue cotton trousers and oil-stained jacket that he was wearing and hung them on a nail just inside the door.  Then he gave a last look round, presumably to satisfy himself that everything was in order, and shutting the door with a bang, turned the key in the lock.

I naturally thought he was going to stuff that desirable object into his pocket, but as it happened he did nothing of the kind.  With a throb of half-incredulous delight I saw that he was standing on tiptoe, inserting it into some small hiding-place just under the edge of the iron roof.

I didn’t wait for further information.  At any moment someone might have come blundering round the corner of the paling, and I felt that I had tempted Fate quite enough already.  So, abandoning my peep-hole, I turned round, and with infinite care crawled back across the grass into the shelter of the trees.

Once there, however, I rolled over on the ground and metaphorically hugged myself.  The situation may not appear to have warranted such excessive rapture, but when a man is practically hopeless even the wildest of possible chances comes to him like music and sunshine.  Forgetting my hunger and my wet clothes in my excitement, I lay there thinking out my plan of action.  I could do nothing, of course, until it was dark:  in fact it would be really better to wait till the household had gone to bed, for several of the back windows looked right out on the garage.  Then, provided I could climb the paling and get out the bicycle without being spotted, I had only to push it up the drive to find myself on the Devonport road.

With this comforting reflection I settled myself down to wait.  It was at least four hours from darkness, with another four to be added to that before I dared make a move.  Looking back now, I sometimes wonder how I managed to stick it out.  Long before dusk my legs and arms had begun to ache again with a dull throbbing sort of pain that got steadily worse, while the chill of my wet clothes seemed to eat into my bones.  Once or twice I got up and crawled a few yards backwards and forwards, but the little additional warmth this performance gave me did not last long.  I dared not indulge in any more violent exercise for fear that there might be warders about in the wood.

What really saved me, I think, was the rain stopping.  It came to an end quite suddenly, in the usual Dartmoor fashion, and within half an hour most of the mist had cleared off too.  I knew enough of the local weather signs to be pretty certain that we were in for a fine night; and sure enough, half an hour after the sun had set a large moon was shining down from a practically cloudless sky.