He dared not light a lamp, but horses as a rule knew him for a friend.  He went into the stall of the first, petted it for a moment and ran his hand down its legs.  He repeated the process with the second, and with so much investigation he was content.  No farm-horse that ever Wogan had seen had such a smooth sleek skin or such fine legs as had those two over which he had passed his hands.  “Now where are the masters of those horses?” he asked himself.  “Why do they leave their cattle at this inn and not show themselves in the kitchen or the courtyard?  Why do they not ask for a couple of my rooms?” Wogan stood in the dark and reflected.  Then he stepped out of the door with even more caution than he had used when entering by it.  He stole silently along to the shed where his trap was housed, and felt beneath the seat.  From beneath the seat he drew out a coil of rope, and a lamp.  The rope he wound about him under his coat.  Then he went back to his staircase and the parlour.

Clementina could read in his face that something was amiss, but she had a great gift of silence.  She waited for him to speak.  Wogan unwound the coil of rope from his body.

“Your Highness laughed at me for that I would not part with my rope.  I have a fear this night will prove my wisdom.”  And with that he began deliberately to break up the chairs in the room.  Clementina asked no questions; she watched him take the rungs and bars of the chairs and test their strength.  Then he cut the coil of rope in half and tied loops at intervals; into the loops he fitted the wooden rungs.  Wogan worked expeditiously for an hour without opening his mouth.  In an hour he had fashioned a rope-ladder.  He went to the window which looked out on the back of the wing, upon the little thicket of fir-trees.  He opened the window cautiously and dropped the ladder down the wall.

“Your Highness has courage,” said he.  “The ladder does not touch the ground, but it will not be far to drop, should there be need.”

The window of Clementina’s bedroom was next to that of the parlour and looked out in the same direction.  Wogan fixed the rope-ladder securely to the foot of the bed and drew the bed close to the window.  He left the lamp upon a chair and went back to the parlour and explained.

“Your Highness,” he added, “there may be no cause for any alarm.  On the other hand, the Governor of Trent may have taken a leaf from my own book.  He may have it in mind to snatch your Highness out of Italy even as I did out of Austria; and of a truth it would be the easier undertaking.  Here are we five miles from the border and in a small tavern set apart from a small village, instead of in the thick of an armed town.”

“But we might start now,” she said.  “We might leave a message behind for Mrs. Misset and wait for her in Verona.”

“I had thought of that.  But if my mere suspicion is the truth, the six men will not be so far from their six horses that we could drive away unnoticed by any one of them.  Nor could we hope to outpace them and six men upon an open road; indeed, I would sooner face them at the head of my staircase here.  And while I hold them back your Highness can creep down that ladder.”