This thought quickened me so much that I touched my darling reverently, and told her in a few short words how I hoped to manage it.

“Sweetest, in two hours’ time, I shall be again with you.  Keep the bar up, and have Gwenny ready to answer any one.  You are safe while they are dining, dear, and drinking healths, and all that stuff; and before they have done with that, I shall be again with you.  Have everything you care to take in a very little compass, and Gwenny must have no baggage.  I shall knock loud, and then wait a little; and then knock twice, very softly.”

With this I folded her in my arms; and she looked frightened at me; not having perceived her danger; and then I told Gwenny over again what I had told her mistress:  but she only nodded her head and said, “Young man, go and teach thy grandmother.”

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CHAPTER XLIV

BROUGHT HOME AT LAST

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To my great delight I found that the weather, not often friendly to lovers, and lately seeming so hostile, had in the most important matter done me a signal service.  For when I had promised to take my love from the power of those wretches, the only way of escape apparent lay through the main Doone-gate.  For though I might climb the cliffs myself, especially with the snow to aid me, I durst not try to fetch Lorna up them, even if she were not half-starved, as well as partly frozen; and as for Gwenny’s door, as we called it (that is to say, the little entrance from the wooded hollow), it was snowed up long ago to the level of the hills around.  Therefore I was at my wit’s end how to get them out; the passage by the Doone-gate being long, and dark, and difficult, and leading to such a weary circuit among the snowy moors and hills.

But now, being homeward-bound by the shortest possible track, I slipped along between the bonfire and the boundary cliffs, where I found a caved way of snow behind a sort of avalanche:  so that if the Doones had been keeping watch (which they were not doing, but revelling), they could scarcely have discovered me.  And when I came to my old ascent, where I had often scaled the cliff and made across the mountains, it struck me that I would just have a look at my first and painful entrance, to wit, the water-slide.  I never for a moment imagined that this could help me now; for I never had dared to descend it, even in the finest weather; still I had a curiosity to know what my old friend was like, with so much snow upon him.  But, to my very great surprise, there was scarcely any snow there at all, though plenty curling high overhead from the cliff, like bolsters over it.  Probably the sweeping of the north-east wind up the narrow chasm had kept the showers from blocking it, although the water had no power under the bitter grip of frost.  All my water-slide was now less a slide than path of ice; furrowed where the waters ran over fluted ridges; seamed where wind had tossed and combed them, even while congealing; and crossed with little steps wherever the freezing torrent lingered.  And here and there the ice was fibred with the trail of sludge-weed, slanting from the side, and matted, so as to make resting-place.