She had not stopped to think how she was going to get out of the house without being seen. A glance out of the front window showed a balcony with a wrought-iron railing, which hung inside the white pillared front piazza, but Charles and his father sat just below, talking in low, pleasant voices. She could not get out that way. Equally impossible, of course, would be the front door, even if she could get through the hall without Betty’s seeing her. With one long look down at Charles, she put out a protesting hand toward him, as if bidding him farewell. It wrung her heart to look at him. She turned quickly away, paused an instant in the middle of the room, and swept it with her eyes, then, with a little tragic wave of renunciation, she went swiftly into the room beyond. The open desk caught her attention. She stopped and, taking up a pen, wrote on a sheet of paper: Goodby. I had to go.—DAWN. She wrote hurriedly, feeling that she had but a brief respite for her flight. Then, casting down the pen, she went to one of the windows in the room and looked out. There was another balcony here, and she stepped out. It was dark, but the candle-light from the dining-room showed a terrace below. It did not look to be a great distance. For an ordinary runaway bride, this balcony would have been impossible as a mode of egress; but Dawn and her schoolmates had practised all sorts of gymnastics from the windows and roof of the old barn, and even on the gables of the house itself. She knew how to drop like a cat from a considerable distance. She could swing from the great high limb of the old cherry tree that overlooked the Hudson, longer than any of the other girls, and then drop gracefully in their midst, without ruffling her composure in the least. But to perform such a feat attired in her first long dress of rustling silk, with a bonnet tied under her chin, and a bundle and hand-bag to look after—to say nothing of doing it in an unknown and almost entirely dark place—was another thing. Dawn glanced back into the room, but could think of no other way. It wouldn’t be pleasant to fall and break her leg at the outset, but she fancied she heard steps coming up the stairs, and to hesitate might bring discovery. She leaned quickly over the railing of the balcony and dropped her bundle down to the terrace. It fell with a hushed thud among the tall grass, and did not sound as if the distance were great.