“I swear to you I am not!”

“Can I—­help you?”

He thought swiftly.

“Is there any one about the house just now?”

“Oh yes; the keeper is stationed in the hall!”

“Miss Wallingford, if you would atone for a deep injury which you have inadvertently done an innocent man, bring me fifty feet of stout rope!  And, I say, see that the door of the bicycle house is left unlocked.  Will you do this?”

“I—­I’ll try.”

A sound on the stairs alarmed her, and with a fleeting smile of sympathy she was gone and the door locked upon him again.

Again the time passed slowly by, and he was left to ponder over the critical nature of the situation as revealed by the luckless Baron’s intelligence.  Clearly he must escape to-night, at all hazards.

“What’s that?  My rope?” he wondered.

But it was only the arrival of his dinner, brought as before upon a tray and set just within the door, as though they feared for the bearer’s life should he venture within reach of this desperate adventurer from Uruguay.

“A very large dish for a very small appetite,” he thought, as he bore his meal over to the bed and drew his chair up before it.

It looked indeed as though a roasted goose must be beneath the cover.  He raised it, and there, behold! lay a large coil of excellent new rope.  The Count chuckled.

“Commend me to the heart and the wit of women!  What man would ever have provided so dainty a dish as this?  Unless, indeed” (he had the breadth of mind to add) “it happened to be a charming adventuress who was in trouble.”

Drinking the half pint of moderate claret which they had allowed him to the happiness and prosperity of all true-hearted women, he could not help regretting that his imprisoned confederate should be so unlikely to enjoy similar good fortune.

“He went too far with those two dear girls.  A woman deceived as he has deceived them will never forgive him.  They’d stand sentry at his cell-door sooner than let the poor Baron escape,” he reflected commiserately, and sighed to think of the disastrous effect this mishap might have both upon his friend’s diplomatic career and domestic felicity.

While waiting for the dusk to deepen, and endeavoring to console himself for the lack of cigars with the poor remedy of cigarettes, he employed his time profitably in tying a series of double knots upon the line of rope.  Then at last, when he could see the stars bright above the trees and hear no sound in the house, he pulled his bed softly to the open window, and to it fastened one end of his rope securely.  The other he quietly let drop, and losing not an instant followed it hand under hand, murmuring anathemas on the rough wall that so scraped his evening trousers.

On tiptoe he stole to the door through which the bicycle had gone.  It yielded to a push, and once inside he ventured to strike a match.