“Certainly I wish you to stay.  Is he—­is M. Raoul outside?”

“I think so, Miss.  Oh, yes—­for certain he is.”

“Then I must insist on your staying with me while I dismiss him.”

“Very good, Miss.  Would you wish me to stay here, or to come with you?”

Dorothea felt herself blushing, and her temper rose again.  “For the moment, stay here.  I will leave the door open and call you when you are wanted.”

She passed into the boudoir and bent to the open window.  At this corner the foundations of the house stood some feet lower than the slope out of which they had been levelled, and she looked down upon a glacis of smooth turf, capped by a glimmering parapet of Bath stone.  Beyond stretched the moonlit park.

“M.  Raoul!” she called, but scarcely above a whisper.

A figure crept out from the dark angle below and climbed to the parapet.

“Dorothea!  Forgive me!  Another night and no word with you—­I could not bear it.”

“You are mad.  You are breaking your parole and risking shame for me.  Nay, you have shamed me already.  Polly is here.”

“Polly is a good girl; she understands.  A word, then, if you must drive me away.”

“Your parole!”

“I can pass the sentries.  No fear of the patrol hereabouts.  Your hand—­ let down your hand to me.  I can reach it from the parapet here—­with my fingers only, not with my lips, though even that you never forbade!”

Weakly, she lowered her arm over the sill.  He reached to touch it, and she leaned her face towards his—­hers in shadow, his pale in the moonlight.

Before their fingers met, a yellow flame leapt from the angle to the left; a loud report banged in her ears and echoed across the park; and Raoul, after swaying a second, pitched forward with a sharp cry and rolled to the foot of the glacis.

Dorothea forced herself back in the room, and stood there upright and shook, with Polly beside her holding her two hands.

“They have shot him!”

The two women listened for a moment.  All was still now.  Polly stepped to the window and, closed it softly.

“But why?  What are you doing?” Dorothea asked, in a hoarse whisper.

“They will find quite enough without that,” said the practical girl, but her voice quavered.

“Yet if they had seen—­Ah, how selfish to think of that now!  Hush—­ that was a groan!  He is alive still.”

She moved towards the window, but Polly dragged her back by main force.

“Listen, Miss!”

Below they heard the sudden unbarring of doors, and Endymion’s voice calling for Mudge, the butler.  A bell pealed in the servants’ hall, stopped, and began ringing again in short and violent jerks.

“Let me go,” commanded Dorothea.  “They will never find him, under the slope there.  He may be bleeding to death.  I must tell—­”

But Polly clung to her.  “They’ll find him safe enough, Miss Dorothea.  There’s Sam, now—­hark!—­at the backdoor bell:  he’ll tell them.”