William, if William it was, rejoined the girl, and Ralph saw her tell him of the coming of the laundress. He caught her roughly by the arm and hurried her along into the cover of the path to the worm-eaten door. As they passed the hillock Ralph saw that they were both shaken by this narrow escape and he felt an immense contempt for them. “All right,” he said to himself. “If it is Marescal or his agents who are in ambush behind that door all the better. Let them collar the two of them and stick them into prison! That girl isn’t worth taking any trouble about.” It may be that he might yet have yielded to a sudden impulse, to an irresistible need to impose his will on these puppets and force an affair he had started to the end he desired. It may be. But this was a day of surprises, on which the events falsified all his predictions, so that he was driven to act almost in spite of himself and at any rate without a moment’s reflection. Some twenty yards from the door, that is to say some twenty yards from the spot at which he supposed the agents of Marescal to be lurking, the man whose head Ralph had seen rise above the wall, sprang out of the bushes which hung over the path, knocked William out with a swing to the jaw, gripped the young girl and tucked her under his arm as if she had been a parcel, snatched up the violin-case, and started to run, not in the direction of the wooden door, but through the plantation of olive trees at the bottom of the garden, and away from the house. Ralph at once grasped the fact that the man had made a circuit round the walls and entered the garden through some breach in the wall, or some accident of the ground. He dashed off in pursuit. His quarry was at once swift and powerful; he ran at a good pace, without looking behind him, as if he had no doubt whatever that no one would be able to prevent him from reaching his goal. He came out of the olive plantation and plunged into a plantation of lemon trees. The ground on which they were planted sloped gently upwards nearly to the top of the wall so that not more than three feet of it rose above the top of the slope. He set the young girl on the top of the wall, gripped her wrists, lowered her over it to the full length of his arms, and let her drop; then he dropped the violin-case over the wall and let himself drop from it. “Splendid!” said Ralph to himself. “He must have hidden a car at the end of the lane which runs along this side of the wall. Then, having spied upon the girl and then captured her, he is returning to the point from which he started and will drop her, inert and helpless, on to the seat of the car.” Running on, Ralph learned that he had been right. He saw a large open car at the end of the lane. The abductor of the girl lost no time: he laid her on the seat, cranked up the car, jumped in beside her, and started.