“There is a potting-box just there,” she said. “If you turned it on end you could reach the window, and then—”
The box gave him two feet of reach. He jumped for the ledge—caught it; pulled; fetched the curve of an arm over the sill.
Then between earth and paradise he hung limp; for a sudden horror was in his Margaret's eyes.
She put upon his brow a hand that pressed him back; gave words to her pictured alarm: “A step upon the gravel!”
'Twixt earth and window, with dangling legs and clutching arms, in muscle-racking pain he hung.
Truly a step, and then another step.
And then a very tornado of sound beat furiously upon the trembling night; with it a flash; from it the pattering of a hundred bullets.
Someone had discharged a gun.
As Satan was hurled, so, plumb out of the gates of Paradise, Bill fell. And now the still air was lashed into a fury of sound-waves, tearing this way and that in twenty keys; now the sleeping garden was torn by rushing figures, helter-skelter for life and honour.
Sounds!—the melancholy bellow of that gardener, Mr. Fletcher, as the recoil of the bell-mouthed blunderbuss he had fired hurled him prone upon the gravel; the dreadful imprecations of Bill striving to clear his leg of the potting-box through whose side it had plunged; piercing screams of Mrs. Major from a ground-floor room; shrills of alarm from Mr. Marrapit; gurr-r-ing yelps from Abiram in ecstasy of man-hunt.