No.  Yet mingled with the jubilation which the possibility of triumph over our enemy raised in my breast, there was certainly a foreboding.  The Vidame’s hints, no less than his open boasts, had pointed to something to happen before morning—­something wider than the mere murder of a single man.  The warning also which the Baron de Rosny had given us at the inn occurred to me with new meaning.  And I could not shake the feeling off.  I fancied, as I sat in the darkness astride of my beam, that I could see, closing the narrow vista of the street, the heavy mass of the Louvre; and that the murmur of voices and the tramp of men assembling came from its courts, with now and again the stealthy challenge of a sentry, the restrained voice of an officer.  Scarcely a wayfarer passed beneath me:  so few, indeed, that I had no fear of being detected from below.  And yet unless I was mistaken, a furtive step, a subdued whisper were borne to me on every breeze, from every quarter.  And the night was full of phantoms.

Perhaps all this was mere nervousness, the outcome of my position.  At any rate I felt no more of it when Croisette joined me.  We had our daggers, and that gave me some comfort.  If we could once gain entrance to the house opposite, we had only to beg, or in the last resort force our way downstairs and out, and then to hasten with what speed we might to Pavannes’ dwelling.  Clearly it was a question of time only now; whether Bezers’ band or we should first reach it.  And struck by this I whispered Marie to be quick.  He seemed to be long in coming.

He scrambled down hand over hand at last, and then I saw that he had not lingered above for nothing.  He had contrived after getting out of the window to let down the shutter.  And more he had at some risk lengthened our rope, and made a double line of it, so that it ran round a hinge of the shutter; and when he stood beside us, he took it by one end and disengaged it.  Good, clever Marie!

“Bravo!” I said softly, clapping him on the back.  “Now they will not know which way the birds have flown!”

So there we all were, one of us, I confess, trembling.  We slid easily enough along the beam to the opposite house.  But once there in a row one behind the other with our faces to the wall, and the night air blowing slantwise—­well I am nervous on a height and I gasped.  The window was a good six feet above the beam, The casement—­it was unglazed—­was open, veiled by a thin curtain, and alas! protected by three horizontal bars—­stout bars they looked.

Yet we were bound to get up, and to get in; and I was preparing to rise to my feet on the giddy bridge as gingerly as I could, when Marie crawled quickly over us, and swung himself up to the narrow sill, much as I should mount a horse on the level.  He held out his foot to me, and making an effort I reached the same dizzy perch.  Croisette for the time remained below.

A narrow window-ledge sixty feet above the pavement, and three bars to cling to!  I cowered to my holdfasts, envying even Croisette.  My legs dangled airily, and the black chasm of the street seemed to yawn for me.  For a moment I turned sick.  I recovered from that to feel desperate.  I remembered that go forward we must, bars or no bars.  We could not regain our old prison if we would.