“It’s up and away now for our wedding-trip,” he said. “We must be in Soyland by dawn. I know a place there. Are you well shod? Milk and bread we have; give them to me, and give me Jimmy. Now, Jimmy, my man.--Kiss me again, dear.” And so, with their kiss, begins the story of their flight. Could they have gone direct, they were but ten miles from Trawden Edge. The Causeway, three miles to the north of them, and running away like the side of a triangle, crossed the high undulating plateau that was formed by the joining of a dozen Shelves and Ridges; their own course lay up and over each Ridge as they came to it. They began to breast the first Ridge, that that shuts in the hamlet of Holdsworth, at half-past eleven of a hot and moonless night, with Arcturus peeping over a distant crest for their guide. They struck knee-deep heather in twenty minutes, and their progress was a plunging and floundering through it. It snapped and crackled loudly. “Kilt yourself up as much as you can, dear; there’s none to see,” Monjoy muttered; but her gathering up of her skirts made little difference, and in the absence of moon the winding tracks between the thickest of it could not be seen. They flushed a covey of birds, that rose with harsh cries, and Monjoy, with the provisions on his back and Jimmy sleeping on his arm, went a little ahead, seeking such choice of tracks as he could. Cicely’s hair made a dim and ghostly shape in the darkness. The ascent grew steep, and Monjoy assisted Cicely constantly. She began to breathe short; and ever as they toiled upwards the sharp snapping of the dry heather accompanied them. They gained the top of the Ridge, crossed it, descended again, and set forth up the next. In an hour they were across the Holdsworth valley, nearing the second top. They had not seen a sentry. They raised another slope of the hill, and a dimness less black showed, a shorn crest of grey bents among the heather. “Courage--it will be easier there,” Monjoy murmured in Cicely’s ear; and they crossed a hollow slack of heather that lay between them and the short grass. Over the faraway moor to the north the Polestar had lifted, and the tail of the Plough, and Monjoy passed his arm about Cicely and helped her to the bents. A dozen yards within the patch he seized her shoulder and drew her sharply back into the heather again. A voice fifty yards away had challenged them, and they had heard the cocking of a musket. They dropped flat into the heather, and Jimmy gave a little whimper. Again the voice challenged, nearer; and then fortune came to their aid. A ewe, with a couple of lambs, lifted up her woody voice in the night and scampered past them down the slope they had ascended. They saw the dark form of the sentry turn after the ewe and disappear. “What clothes have you got on, Cicely?” Monjoy whispered. “My blacks--for Sally,” she whispered back.