Panic made her callous. Plainly his struggles increased; each second he fought harder and harder for his life. It never occurred to her that if she did escape he would probably be left alone till the morning, when the odds were that assistance would came too late. She gave no heed to the thought of the strong man contending, in the pitch-black room, helplessly, with death, with help, willing help, so close at hand; that was a picture which was to occur to her later. By standing on tiptoe she could just get hold of the top of the open window. Pulling herself up; getting her feet on to the sill; leaning out of the open upper half, she tried to see what was beyond. It was not easy to decide. The light was puzzling. Although the stars were visible overhead they were not sufficiently bright to enable her to make out, with certainty, what was below. She seemed to be looking down into some sort of yard, in which dark objects were dimly visible. She supposed it was probably the stable yard; what the dark objects were she could not determine. There were no lights; no one appeared to be moving about; they could hardly be vehicles which, at that hour, had been left out in the open. She seemed to be higher than she expected. Although the ground was invisible it seemed to be very far below. How she was to reach it from the window she had not a notion; her heart failed at the thought of trying to do so. The only way would be to scramble, somehow, over the top sash; then to descend, also somehow, to the sill without; then to lower herself, for the third time, somehow, till she hung from the sill by her hands; and drop, she did not know how far through space, nor did she know into, or on to, what. The prospect was not an alluring one. At the convent there had been a girl, a refractory young lady, who, finding herself ill at ease in her surroundings, essayed to elude them by way of a window which looked out, over the wall, on to the road. That it was unnecessary to take such an unusual route, since she had only to give utterance to her desire to leave to find herself outside as quickly as she could wish, was nothing to her. She was a young lady of a romantic turn of mind. Possibly she wished to make an impression, not only on her schoolfellows and the Sisters, but also on her parents. She knotted together the sheets which she took from her bed; it was presumed that she tied one end to a bar which ran across the window, and, squeezing past it, began to descend by means of the sheets to which she clung. If she did tie one end of the sheet to the bar, then, apparently, it was not tied very securely; because, seemingly, before she got very far, it came unfastened, with the result that she descended with a degree of rapidity which exceeded her expectations. She struck her head, it seemed, with great force against the wall; so that by the time she reached the ground, on which they found her, some twelve feet below, she was, in all human probability, already dead.