There was no time to be lost.  At any moment we might be interrupted.  So the plan was no sooner conceived than carried out.  The rope was made fast to my left wrist.  Then I mounted on Marie’s shoulders, and climbed—­not without quavering—­through the window, taking as little time over it as possible, for a bell was already proclaiming midnight.

All this I had done on the spur of the moment.  But outside, hanging by my hands in the darkness, the strokes of the great bell in my ears, I had a moment in which to think.  The sense of the vibrating depth below me, the airiness, the space and gloom around, frightened me.  “Are you ready?” muttered Marie, perhaps with a little impatience.  He had not a scrap of imagination, had Marie.

“No! wait a minute!” I blurted out, clinging to the sill, and taking a last look at the bare room, and the two dark figures between me and the light.  “No!” I added, hurriedly.  “Croisette—­boys, I called you cowards just now.  I take it back!  I did not mean it!  That is all!” I gasped.  “Let go!”

A warm touch on my hand.  Something like a sob.

The next moment I felt myself sliding down the face of the house, down into the depth.  The light shot up.  My head turned giddily.  I clung, oh, how I clung to that rope!  Half way down the thought struck me that in case of accident those above might not be strong enough to pull me up again.  But it was too late to think of that, and in another second my feet touched the beam.  I breathed again.  Softly, very gingerly, I made good my footing on the slender bridge, and, disengaging the rope, let it go.  Then, not without another qualm, I sat down astride of the beam, and whistled in token of success.  Success so far!

It was a strange position, and I have often dreamed of it since.  In the darkness about me Paris lay to all seeming asleep.  A veil, and not the veil of night only, was stretched between it and me; between me, a mere lad, and the strange secrets of a great city; stranger, grimmer, more deadly that night than ever before or since.  How many men were watching under those dimly-seen roofs, with arms in their hands?  How many sat with murder at heart?  How many were waking, who at dawn would sleep for ever, or sleeping who would wake only at the knife’s edge?  These things I could not know, any more than I could picture how many boon-companions were parting at that instant, just risen from the dice, one to go blindly—­the other watching him—­to his death?  I could not imagine, thank Heaven for it, these secrets, or a hundredth part of the treachery and cruelty and greed that lurked at my feet, ready to burst all bounds at a pistol-shot.  It had no significance for me that the past day was the 23rd of August, or that the morrow was St. Bartholomew’s feast!