I grinned behind the spy's back at this masterly way of getting George's servant to do James's work. Master Freake started at once, and, stepping with him to the door, I whispered, "Give us fifteen minutes." "Right!" he whispered back again. "Look in your holsters!" As soon as he had gone, the Colonel ordered me to guard the door, and this gave me the chance of putting on my boots again. The Colonel, cutting off with his sword a good length of bell rope, made a swift and most workmanlike job of tying the spy into a knot. He then opened the window, and, Margaret taking my place meanwhile, he and I cautiously bundled Weir on to the balcony, shut down the window, and left him safe and silent. "Be in the porch in ten minutes, Margaret, ready to start. Oliver, get the horses there ready in that time. You ride the troop-horse, and Freake has provided a mare for Margaret. Quick's the work and sharp's the motion!" Margaret and I started together to carry out our orders. Once in the passage we had to go different ways, and I bowed and was going mine without a word, when she put her hand on my arm and stayed me. "I'm sorry you've lost your Virgil," she said. I wondered, as already so many times I had wondered, at the somersaults of feeling she was capable of. Where was now the Margaret of the short, disdainful laugh? Not here, in the twilight between the bright room and the black yard. Here was a subtle, mysterious Margaret, half regret and half caprice, with one thought in her eyes and another on her lips. "So am I, madam. I wish it had been Kate's cookery-book." She would have mastered me had I stayed another second. I bowed again and left her. And this is, perhaps, the best place to say that I did not lose my Virgil after all. Here it is on the table as I write, still the dearest of all my books. On each side of the healing an irregular curve of teeth-marks cuts into the yellowing parchment. Dear, brave Cherry-Cheeks sent it home by the hands of a vagrom pedlar, laboriously and exactly writing on the package the inscription she found on the fly leaf: OLIVER WHEATMAN, Esquire, of the Hanyards, Staffordshire, _Aetatis anno_ 13 I routed out ostlers, and by dint of a judicious blend of cursings and bribings had the horses ready under the archway in time. Margaret was there waiting, with our pretty maid fluttering around her. The Colonel was within, settling with the word-warrior host. I helped Margaret into the saddle and led her horse into the street, turning its head northward. In a moment, her father clattered after her on Sultan. I went back to smile farewell to Cherry-Cheeks and deal out my bribes, but was after them before they had trotted a stone's throw.