Then I tried planning for our future; but the morrow promised her presence, and for the time I could not get my thoughts past that. There was no need to discount future joy by drawing bills of dear anticipation. But it was tonic to my brain to look back upon the hopeless despair in which I had lain weltering so few hours before. Now they seemed years away—and how I blessed their remoteness, those sick hours of anguish! Yes, though I had not given up my purpose, I had surely given up the hope that kept it alive. Then Mother Pêche’s soothsaying over the lines of my palm came back to me: “_Your heart’s desire is nigh your death of hope_!” Wonderful old woman! How came such wisdom to your simple heart, with no teachers but herbs, and dews, and stillnesses of the open marsh, and hill-whispers, and the unknown stars? Out of some deep truth you spoke, surely; for even as my hope died, had not my heart’s desire come? And I said to myself, “It is but a narrow and shallow heart that expects to understand all it believes. Do we not walk as men blindfolded in the citadel of mystery? What seem to us the large things and unquestionable may, the half of them, be vain—and small, derided things an uninterpreted message of truth!” My revery was broken by Marc laying free hands upon mine. “Are you awake?” he whispered. “The time has come. See! This is the way to open them.” And very easily, as it seemed, he slipped the iron from my wrists. “Feel!” he went on, in the same soft whisper. I followed his fingers in the dimness. There was no light but the murk of a smoky lanthorn some way off, where the guards sat dejectedly smoking,—and I caught the method of unlocking the spring. “Free your next neighbour, and pass the word along,” continued Marc; and I did so. It was all managed with noiseless precision. In a very few minutes—which seemed an hour—there was a sneeze from the furthermost corner of the hold, beyond the place where the guards sat. It was not the most natural and easy sneeze in the world, but it served. It was answered by another from the opposite corner. The shrill, silly sound was yet in the air when the ominous form of long Philibert Trou loomed high behind the sitting guards and fell upon one of them like fate; while at the same moment, like a springing cat, the lithe figure of La Mouche shot up at the other’s throat. For such skilled hands it was but a moment’s work, and no noise about it. Like the rising of an army of spectres, every man came silently to his feet. Seizing the musket of the nearest guard, where he lay motionless, I glided to the hatch, just far enough ahead of Marc to get my foot first on the ladder. As I reached the deck the sentry, not three paces distant, was just turning. With a yell to warn his comrades he sprang at me. Nimbly I avoided his bayonet thrust, and the butt of my musket brought him down. I had reserved my fire for the possibility of a more dangerous encounter.