“There indeed is God’s finger pointing,” cried Wogan.  “Sir, give me leave to follow it.”

The Chevalier still stood looking at him in silence.  Then he said suddenly, “Go, then, and God speed you!  You are a gallant gentleman.”

He sat down thereupon and wrote a letter to the King of Poland, asking him to entrust the rescue of his daughter into Wogan’s hands.  This letter Wogan took and money for his journey.

“You will have preparations to make,” said the Chevalier.  “I will not keep you.  You have horses?”

Mr. Wogan had two in a stable at Bologna.  “But,” he added, “there is a horse I left this morning six miles this side of Fiesole, a black horse, and I would not lose it.”

“Nor shall you,” said the Chevalier.

Wogan crept back to his lodging as cautiously as he had left it.  There was no light in any window but in his own, where his servant, Marnier, awaited him.  Wogan opened the door softly and found the porter asleep in his chair.  He stole upstairs and made his preparations.  These, however, were of the simplest kind, and consisted of half-a-dozen orders to Marnier and the getting into bed.  In the morning he woke before daybreak and found Marnier already up.  They went silently out of the house as the dawn was breaking.  Marnier had the key to the stables, and they saddled the two horses and rode through the blind and silent streets with their faces muffled in their cloaks.

They met no one, however, until they were come to the outskirts of the town.  But then as they passed the mouth of an alley a man came suddenly out and as suddenly drew back.  The morning was chill, and the man was closely wrapped.

Wogan could not distinguish his face or person, and looking down the alley he saw at the end of it only a garden wall, and over the top of the wall a thicket of trees and the chimney-tops of a low house embosomed amongst them.  He rode on, secure in the secrecy of his desperate adventure.  But that same morning Mr. Whittington paid a visit to Wogan’s lodging and asked to be admitted.  He was told that Mr. Wogan had not yet returned to Bologna.

“So, indeed, I thought,” said he; and he sauntered carelessly along, not to his own house, but to one smaller, situated at the bottom of a cul-de-sac and secluded amongst trees.  At the door he asked whether her Ladyship was yet visible, and was at once shown into a room with long windows which stood open to the garden.  Her Ladyship lay upon a sofa sipping her coffee and teasing a spaniel with the toe of her slipper.

“You are early,” she said with some surprise.

“And yet no earlier than your Ladyship,” said Whittington.

“I have to make my obeisance to my King,” said she, stifling a yawn.  “Could one, I ask you, sleep on so important a day?”

Mr. Whittington laughed genially.  Then he opened the door and glanced along the passage.  When he turned back into the room her Ladyship had kicked the spaniel from the sofa and was sitting bolt upright with all her languor gone.