A tedious-toned clock over in the town struck twelve before she dared begin her attempt. The watchman had just gone beneath her window on his hourly round, and with the cessation of his slow pace upon the gravel the peace of midnight overlay everything. For almost two hours thereafter Jean labored with her rude implement at the staples which held the woven-wire barrier before her window. The first staple came hardest, but she had pried it loose by the time the watch repassed. In a half-hour more she had freed enough of the netting to serve her end, but she deferred the great moment till the man should again have come and gone. It was a difficult wait, centuries long, and anxiety began to cheat and befool her reason. She questioned whether she had not lost count of time. Suppose she had let him come upon her unheeded! Suppose he had caught some hint of her employment! Suppose he were even now lurking, spider-like, in the shadows! Then the clock struck twice in its deliberative way, the measured footfall recurred, and her brain cleared. Five minutes later she bent back the netting and calculated the distance to the ground. She judged it some sixteen or eighteen feet, all told, or a sheer drop of more than half that space as she would hang by her finger-tips. There could be no leaving a telltale rope of bedclothes to dangle. Such folly would set the telephone wires humming within the hour. She must drop, and drop with good judgment; since the grass plot, which she counted upon to break her fall, gave place directly below to an area, grated over to be sure, but undesirable footing notwithstanding. She tossed her brown shawl to the ground first, and noted, with some oddly detached segment of her mind, that it spread itself on the sward in the shape of a huge bat. A romping girlhood steadying her nerves, she let herself cautiously over the sill, and for an instant hung motionless, her eyes below. Then, gathering momentum from a double swing, she suddenly relaxed her hold, cleared the danger-point, and alighted, uninjured and almost without sound, upon the springing turf. IV For a moment Jean crouched listening where she fell. No sound issuing from within, she caught up her shawl and stole quickly toward the point where she planned to scale the high fence which still shut her from freedom. There was no moon, but the night was luminous with starshine, and she hugged the shadows of the cottages. These buildings shouldered one another closely in most part, but she came presently to a gap in the friendly obscurity where a site awaited a structure for which the state had vouchsafed no funds. It was bare of any sort of screen whatever, and lay in full range not only of the quadrangle, which it broke, but of the gatehouse beyond.