Was she aghast at him? he asked himself. He stood half-checked while her steady eyes left his face, roamed from him--contrasting, as ashamed he felt, the purity of the still night with the clamour of his turbulent passions--and settled on an adjacent flowerbed. At last she spoke, very calmly. “There is a potting-box just there,” she said. “If you turned it on end you could reach the window, and then--” The box gave him two feet of reach. He jumped for the ledge--caught it; pulled; fetched the curve of an arm over the sill. Then between earth and paradise he hung limp; for a sudden horror was in his Margaret's eyes. She put upon his brow a hand that pressed him back; gave words to her pictured alarm: “A step upon the gravel!” 'Twixt earth and window, with dangling legs and clutching arms, in muscle-racking pain he hung. Truly a step, and then another step. And then a very tornado of sound beat furiously upon the trembling night; with it a flash; from it the pattering of a hundred bullets. Someone had discharged a gun. As Satan was hurled, so, plumb out of the gates of Paradise, Bill fell. And now the still air was lashed into a fury of sound-waves, tearing this way and that in twenty keys; now the sleeping garden was torn by rushing figures, helter-skelter for life and honour. Sounds!--the melancholy bellow of that gardener, Mr. Fletcher, as the recoil of the bell-mouthed blunderbuss he had fired hurled him prone upon the gravel; the dreadful imprecations of Bill striving to clear his leg of the potting-box through whose side it had plunged; piercing screams of Mrs. Major from a ground-floor room; shrills of alarm from Mr. Marrapit; _gurr-r-ing_ yelps from Abiram in ecstasy of man-hunt. Rushing figures!--Bill, freed from his box, at top speed towards the shrubbery; Mr. Fletcher, up from his fall, with tremendous springs bounding across the lawn; Abiram in hurtling pursuit. More sounds!--panic screams from Mr. Fletcher, heavily labouring; the protest of a window roughly raised; from George's head, thrust into the night: “Yi! Yi! Yi! Hup, then! Good dog! Sock him! Sock him! Yi! Yi! Yi!” We must seek the fuse that touched off this hideous turbulence. CHAPTER III. Alarums And Excursions By Night. I. We are going into a lady's bedroom, but I promise you the thing shall be nicely done: there shall not be a blush. It was midnight when Bill Wyvern projected the scheme whose execution we have followed through sweetness to disaster. Two hours earlier the Marrapit household had sought its beds. It was Mr. Marrapit's wise rule that each member of his establishment should pass before him as he or she sought their chambers. Night is the hour when the thoughts take on unbridled licence; and he would send his household to sleep each with some last admonition to curb fantastic wanderings of the mind.