John Gore let his heart have its way that night, for the impulse in him was too strong to be withstood. Yet, like the cool and dogged man he was, he chastened the adventurous passion of a boy with the quiet hardihood of one who has learned to hold a rough ship’s company in awe of him. Unbuckling his sword, he thrust it into the grass under the tree, for the thing would only have cumbered him, and after drawing off his heavy boots and coat he went quietly to the bridge and across it to the court-yard gate. As on the night when he had waited there with Mr. Pepys, he could see a light burning in a window near the ground and the shadow of some one moving in the room within. Taking a couple of steps back, he made a running jump at the gate, and got his hands on the top thereof with hardly a sound to convict him of clumsiness. The rest was easy, and he straddled the gate and then dropped softly into the court-yard. His chief fear was lest the dog should hear him and give tongue. But there was not so much as the rattle of a chain to show that the beast was on the alert. Moving along the court-yard wall that edged the moat, he came to the terraceway that ran along the western front of the house. The place was smothered with weeds and brambles, the brambles catching his ankles like gins, so that he was constrained to go warily and set his teeth and his temper against the pricks. The wall fell to a couple of feet where the terrace began, giving a glimpse of the dim black waters of the moat. John Gore halted when the outlines of the tower rose above him against the night sky. The western face thereof came down to the terrace stones, and in the western face was the window at which he had seen the hands appear. Crossing the terrace, he leaned against the plinth of the tower, almost burying himself in the ivy that hung there in masses. But for the very faint shivering of the leaves he could hear no sound, not even the sound of a voice from the far wing where the couple appeared to have their quarters. John Gore ran his hands along the plinth, feeling for the main stems of the ivy where they had lifted and cocked the flagstones of the terrace. These stems were stout and tough as a great ship’s cable, forked here and there so that a man’s foot might rest, and sending out a net-work of ropes over the tower. John Gore thought of Sparkin, and how he would have laid a hatful of gold on the boy’s pluck and sinew for such a climb. But since there was no Sparkin to venture such a climb for him, he pulled his stockings up, took a look at the precipice overhead, and staked his neck on a scramble into the dark.