A summons from her father obliged her to leave the aviary.  She was in great alarm lest he might come to look for her there; his suspicious nature would have been likely to scent danger in the proximity of his daughter’s window to the prisoner’s.  It had occurred to Clelia a short time before, while so anxiously awaiting Fabrice’s appearance, that pebbles might be made factors in their correspondence, by wrapping the paper on which the message was written round them and throwing them up so they should fall within the open upper portion of the screen.  The device would have worked well unless Fabrice’s keeper chanced to be in the room at the time.

Our prisoner proceeded to tear one of his shirts into narrow strips, forming a sort of ribbon.  Shortly after nine o’clock that evening he heard a tapping on the boxes of the orange-trees under his window; he cautiously lowered his ribbon, and on drawing it up again found attached to its free end a long cord by means of which he hauled up a supply of chocolate, and, to his inexpressible satisfaction, a package of note-paper and a pencil.  He dropped the cord again, but to no purpose; perhaps the sentries on their rounds had approached the orange-trees.  But his delight was sufficient for one evening.  He sat down and wrote a long letter to Clelia; scarcely was it ended when he fastened it to the cord and let it down.  For more than three hours he waited in vain for some one to come and take it; two or three times he drew it up and made alterations in it.  “If Clelia does not get my letter to-night,” he said to himself, “while those ideas of poison are troubling her brain, it is more than likely that to-morrow she will refuse to receive it.”

The fact was that Clelia had been obliged to drive to the city with her father.  Fabrice knew how matters stood when he heard the General’s carriage enter the court about half-past twelve; he knew it was the General’s carriage by the horses’ step.  What was his delight when, shortly after hearing the jingle of the General’s spurs as he crossed the esplanade, and the rattle of muskets as the sentries presented arms, he felt a gentle tug at the cord, the end of which he had kept wrapped around his wrist!  Something heavy was made fast to the cord; two little jerks notified him to haul up.  He had some difficulty in landing the object over a cornice that projected under his window.

The article that he had secured at expense of so much trouble proved to be a carafe of water wrapped in a shawl.  The poor young man, who had been living for so long a time in such complete solitude, covered the shawl with rapturous kisses.  But words are inadequate to express his emotion when, after so many days of vain waiting, he discovered a scrap of paper pinned to the shawl.