“Tell us in what direction to go and we will fend for ourselves and leave you free.”

“Through the garden, then, at the back and into the woods—­the fence has a gap and from it a path leads up to a quarry among the trees; you cannot miss.  The quarry is full of brambles—­good hiding, in case we have trouble.  No cavalryman will win so far, you may be sure.”

Margery gathered her skirts about her, and we stole out into the darkness.  At the door she turned up her face to Mark.  “Kiss me, my brother.”  He kissed her, and breaking away (as I thought) with a low groan, strode from us up the lane.

“Now why should he go up the lane?” mused Margery:  and I too wondered.  For the first alarm must needs come from the lower end towards which he had been walking with his other visitor, when we first spied on the cottage through the bushes.

But ’twas not for us to guess how the troops were disposed or where the outposts lay.  We made our escape through the little garden, and, blundering along the woodland path behind it, came at length to a thicket of brambles over which hung the scarp of the quarry with a fringe of trees above it pitch-black against the foggy moonlight.  Here on the soaked ground I found a clear space and a tumbled stone or two, on which we crouched together, sleepless and intently listening.

For an hour we heard no sound.  Then the valley towards Lostwithiel shook with a dull explosion, which puzzled us a great deal. (But the meaning, I have since learnt was this:—­Two prisoners in the church there had contrived to climb up into the steeple and, pulling the ladder after them, jeered down upon the rebels’ Provost Marshal, who was now preparing for a night retreat of the Infantry upon Fowey and in a hurry to be gone.  “I’ll fetch you down,” said he, and with a barrel of powder blew most of the slates off the roof but without harming the defiant pair who were found still perched on the steeple next morning.)

After this the hours passed without sound.  It seemed incredible, this silence in the ring of wakeful outposts.  Margery shivered now and again, and I knew that her eyes were open, though she said nothing.  For me, towards morning, I dropped into a doze, and woke to the tightening of her hand upon my arm.

“Hist!”

I listened with her.  The sky had grown grey about us, and up through the dripping trees came a soft and regular footfall, as of a body of horse moving past.  “It will be Mark’s troop,” I whispered, and listened again.  It seemed to me that the noise moved away to our right instead of towards Lostwithiel.  A quick suspicion took me then:  I scaled the right-hand side of the quarry at a run, burst through the fringe of pines, and came out suddenly upon a knoll in full view of the down.  The first gleam of sunshine was breaking over this slope, and towards it at an easy trot rode the whole body of rebel cavalry, in number above a thousand.