She collected a few things, what little store of money she had,--four or five gulden, perhaps,--and a pair of light shoes and clean stockings, and a fresh handkerchief or two, and a little collar, and then she started. He had told her to bring what she could carry easily. She must not disobey him, but she would fain have brought more had she dared. At the last moment she returned, and took a small hair-brush and a comb. Then she looked round the room with a hurried glance, put out her candle, and crept silently down the stairs. On the first landing she paused, for it was possible that Peter might be returning. She listened, and then remembered that she would have heard Peter's feet even on the walk outside. Very quickly, but still more gently than ever, she went down the last stairs. From the foot of the stairs into the passage there was a moment in which she must be within sight of the kitchen door. She flew by, and felt that she must have been seen. But she was not seen. In an instant she was at the open window, and in another instant she was standing beside her lover on the gravel path. What he said to her she did not hear; what he did she did not know. She had completed her task now; she had done her part, and had committed herself entirely into his hands. She would ask no question. She would trust him entirely. She only knew that at the moment his arm was round her, and that she was being lifted off the bank into the river. "Dearest girl! can you see? No; nothing, of course, as yet. Step down. There is a boat here. There are two boats. Lean upon me, and we can walk over. There. Do not mind treading softly. They cannot hear because of the rain. We shall be out of it in a minute. I am sorry you should be wet, but yet it is better for us." She hardly understood him, but yet she did as he told her, and in a few minutes she was standing on the other bank of the river, in the Ruden Platz. Here Linda perceived that there was a man awaiting them, to whom Ludovic gave certain orders about the boats. Then Ludovic took her by the hand and ran with her across the Platz, till they stood beneath the archway of the brewery warehouse where she had so often watched him as he went in and out. "Here we are safe," he said, stooping down and kissing her, and brushing away the drops of rain from the edges of her hair. Oh, what safety! To be there, in the middle of the night, with him, and not know whither she was to go, where she was to lie, whether she would ever again know that feeling of security which had been given to her throughout her whole life by her aunt's presence and the walls of her own house. Safe! Was ever peril equal to hers? "Linda, say that you love me. Say that you are my own." "I do love you," she said; "otherwise how should I be here?" "And you had promised to marry that man!" "I should never have married him. I should have died."