“But where will you be?”

“I shall be waiting outside the ticket barrier with the tickets.”

“Supposing he won’t?”

“I’ll risk seeing him once more.  Go and ask if you can speak to him a minute, and tell him to come out in the garden presently.  Say you’ve knocked a ball over or something and will Master Cyril throw it back.  I say, we might really put a message inside a ball and throw it over.  That was the way the Duc de Beaufort escaped in Twenty Years After.”

Hacking looked blankly at Mark.

“But it’s dark and wet,” he objected.  “I shouldn’t knock a ball over on a wet evening like this.”

“Well, the skivvy won’t think of that, and Pomeroy will guess that we’re trying to communicate with him.”

Mark thought how odd it was that Hacking should be so utterly blind to the romance of the enterprise.  After a few more objections which were disposed of by Mark, Hacking agreed to go next door and try to get the prisoner into the garden.  He succeeded in this, and Mark rated Cyril for not having given him the sovereign yesterday.

“However, bunk in and get it now, because I shan’t see you again till to-morrow at the station, and I must have some money to buy the tickets.”

He explained the details of the escape and exacted from Cyril a promise not to back out at the last moment.

“You’ve got nothing to do.  It’s as simple as A B C. It’s too simple, really, to be much of a rag.  However, as it isn’t a rag, but serious, I suppose we oughtn’t to grumble.  Now, you are coming, aren’t you?”

Cyril promised that nothing but physical force should prevent him.

“If you funk, don’t forget that you’ll have betrayed your faith and . . .”

At this moment Mark in his enthusiasm slipped off the wall, and after uttering one more solemn injunction against backing out at the last minute he left Cyril to the protection of Angels for the next twenty-four hours.

Although he would never have admitted as much, Mark was rather astonished when Cyril actually did present himself at Slowbridge station in time to catch the 5.47 train up to town.  Their compartment was not empty, so that Mark was unable to give Cyril that lesson in serving at the altar which he had intended to give him.  Instead, as Cyril seemed in his reaction to the excitement of the escape likely to burst into tears at any moment, he drew for him a vivid picture of the enjoyable life to which the train was taking him.

“Father Dorward says that the country round Green Lanes is ripping.  And his church is Norman.  I expect he’ll make you his ceremonarius.  You’re an awfully lucky chap, you know.  He says that next Corpus Christi, he’s going to have Mass on the village green.  Nobody will know where you are, and I daresay later on you can become a hermit.  You might become a saint.  The last English saint to be canonized was St. Thomas Cantilupe of Hereford.  But of course Charles the First ought to have been properly canonized.  By the time you die I should think we should have got back canonization in the English Church, and if I’m alive then I’ll propose your canonization.  St. Cyril Pomeroy you’d be.”