Usk yielded, with a sufficiently bad grace, and they waited impatiently until Mr Hicks thought the mate’s party would be on its way back from Paranati, and then started for the frontier. The Gendarmerie officer at the Pannonian post came out and wished them luck as they passed, and they crossed the frontier-line and began to climb the street of the village, which lay some few hundred yards beyond it. Several of Helene’s old acquaintances came out to greet her, and while she talked to them through the imperfect medium of the customs-officer as interpreter, Mr Hicks and Usk went into the post-office for a moment. When they emerged, Usk looked noticeably stouter, a fact attributable to the length of thin, tough rope, knotted at intervals, which was wound round his body under his coat. This rope Mr Hicks had obtained in the morning through the postmaster, and ensuring his secrecy by a judicious gift and the promise of another, had employed him to make the knots. It would have been wholly inadequate had the asylum been a modern building, with smooth, well-finished walls, but the masonry had been rough when it was first laid, and was now so weather-beaten that a young and active man might almost have descended it without the aid of a rope at all. Mr Hicks remained in the village to meet Mr Bradwell, and William, leaving his horse, took the driver’s seat in the buggy. Usk walked up the hill by the side of the carriage, and loitered about the gateway, while Helene, with much outward dignity and inward shrinking, paid her call upon the doctor. It was almost more than her husband could endure to let her enter the place by herself. What if she should be kidnapped too! But she looked round and smiled at him bravely when she went in at the gate, and after he had fidgeted about for the prescribed three or four minutes, he began to take an interest in the masonry, and to cross-question the porter. The man knew nothing of the history of the place, but he intimated that the noble gentleman was quite at liberty to walk round the outside, as far as the cliff afforded a foothold, and see what the rest of the walls were like. Usk waited only until he was out of sight of the gateway to unwind himself from the rope, and fasten the end of it round a suitable stone. Then he went on, along a very narrow ledge, until it ended suddenly, and he caught sight of Cyril looking over the wall some ten feet farther on. At first his heart stood still as he realised that he could not get under the wall at the right spot, but in a moment he saw that this did not really signify. The ledge was so narrow that it would have been next to impossible to throw the stone up perpendicularly with any hope of its lodging on the wall, but from the spot where he stood he could throw it diagonally with some chance of success. Cyril held up a finger as a warning to him not to begin yet, and he gathered the rope in his left hand and waited. Then the sound of a sudden tumult, shouts, yells,