“Ah!”

His mind had caught, of a sudden, at a really brilliant idea.

“I accept,” said he firmly, looking Mrs Bosenna hard in the eyes, and her eyes sank under his gaze.

“Hi!  Heads!” sang out a voice, and simultaneously the ladder which William Skin had been hauling aloft, came crashing down and struck the flagged path scarcely two yards away.

A second later Cai had Mrs Bosenna in his arms.  “You are not hurt?” he gasped.

She disengaged herself with a half-hysterical laugh.  “Hurt?  Am I? . . .  No, of course I am not.”

“The damned rope slipped,” growled William Skin in explanation, from his perch on the ladder under the eaves.

“Slipped?” Cai ran to the rope and examined it.  “Of course it slipped, you lubber!” He stepped back on the pathway and spoke up to Skin as he would have talked on shipboard to a blundering seaman in the cross-trees.  “Ain’t a slip-knot made to slip?  And when a man’s fool enough to tie one in place of a hitch—­”

He cast off the rope, bent it around the rung with, as it seemed, one turn of the hand, and with a jerk had it firm and true.

“Make way, up there!” he called.

“You’re never going to—­to risk yourself,” protested Mrs Bosenna.

“Risk myself?  Lord, ma’am, for what age d’ye take me?” Cai caught up the slack of the rope and hitched it taut over his shoulder.  He was rejuvenated.  He made a spring for the ladder, and went up it much as twenty years ago he would have swarmed up the ratlines.  “Make yourself small,” he commanded, as Skin, at imminent risk of falling, drew to one side before his onset.  Cai was past him in a jiffy, over the eaves, balancing himself with miraculous ease on the slippery thatch.  “Now ease up the ladder!”

He had anchored himself by pure trick of balance, and was pulling with a steady hand almost as soon as Skin, collecting his wits, could reach out to fend the ladder off from crushing the edge of the eaves.  Ten seconds later, by seaman’s sleight of foot, he had gained a second anchorage half-way up the slope, had gathered up all the slack of the rope into a seaman’s coil, and with a circular sweep of the arm had flung it deftly around the chimney.  The end, instead of sliding down to his hand, hitched itself among the thorns of the rampant Devoniensis.  Did this daunt him?  It checked him for an instant only.  The next, he had balanced himself for a fresh leap, gained the roof-ridges, and, seated astride of it, was hauling up the ladder, hand over fist, close to the chimney-base.

The marvel was, the close thatch showed no trace of having been trampled or disturbed.

“Darn the feller, he’s as ajjile as a cat!” swore William Skin.

“Pass up the clippers, you below!” Cai commanded, forgetting that the man was deaf.  “If your mistress’ll stand back in the path a bit, I’ll pick out the shoots one by one and hold ’em up for her to see, so’s she can tell me which to cut away.”