He felt in his pocket for the pistol, and it was ready to hand.  Then he buttoned his coat round him and swung himself out of the window.  He held his body away from the wall with one knee and went down hand under hand.  It was so quietly done that it did not even rouse the birds in the near-by trees.  Before he realized that he had come to the lower windows his feet touched the earth and he was free.

He stood for a moment where he was, and then slipped rapidly across the open, moonlit space into the inky gloom of the trees.  He made a half-circle round before the house and looked up at it.  It lay gray and black and still in the night.  Where the moonlight was upon it, it was gray; where there was shadow, black as black velvet, and the windows were like open, dead eyes.  He looked toward Arthur Benham’s room, and there was no light, but he knew that the boy was awake and waiting there, shivering probably in the dark.  He wondered where Coira O’Hara was, and he pictured her lying in her bed fronting the gloom with sleepless, open eyes, looking into those to-morrows which she had said she saw so well.  He wondered bitterly what the to-morrows were to bring her, but he caught himself up with a stern determination and put her out of his mind.  He did not dare think of her in that hour.

He turned and began to make his way silently under the trees toward the appointed meeting-place.  Once he thought of the old Michel and wondered where that gnarled and withered watch-dog had betaken himself.  Somewhere, within or without the house, he was asleep or pretending to sleep, and Ste. Marie knew that he could be trusted.  The man’s cupidity and his hatred of Captain Stewart together would make him faithful, or faithless, as one chose to look upon it.

He came to that place where a row of lilac shrubs stood against the wall and a half-dead cedar stretched gnarled branches above.  He was a little before his time, and he settled himself to listen and wait, his sharp ears keenly on the alert, his eyes turned toward the dark and quiet house.

The little noises of the night broke upon him with exaggerated clamor.  A crackling twig was a thunderous crash, a bird’s sleepy stir was the sound of pursuit and disaster.  A hundred times he heard the cautious approach of Richard Hartley’s motor-car without the wall, and he fell into a panic of fear lest that machine prove unruly, break down, puncture a tire, or burst into a series of ear-splitting explosions.  But at last—­it seemed to him that he had waited untold hours and that the dawn must be nigh—­there came an unmistakable rustling from overhead and the sound of a hard-drawn breath.  The top of the wall, just at that point, was in moonlight, and a man’s head appeared over it, then an arm and then a leg.  Hartley called down to him in a whisper, and Ste. Marie, from the gloom beneath, whispered a reply.  He said: 

“The boy has promised to come with us.  We sha’n’t have to fight for it.”