After that she felt that further delay would inevitably spell detection. Even now someone must have opened the front door, for a gust of wind and heavy rain driving into the house told the listener quite clearly that the Prince and his friends were leaving the house: anon Clémence and Laurence would be going up to their own apartments.
As swiftly, as furtively as a mouse, Lenora made her way up the stairs: and now there she sat once more in the vast bedchamber, quivering with excitement and with horror, listening for footsteps outside her door. She heard Clémence van Rycke's shuffling footsteps passing down the corridor, and Laurence's more firm ones following closely in their wake: a few whispered words were spoken by mother and son, then doors were closed and all was still once more.
II
The fire had burnt low, only the last dying embers of the charred pine logs threw a wide glowing band across the centre of the room. Lenora sitting by the fire had scarcely moved for a quarter of an hour or even more. Anon she heard the opening and shutting of the front door.
It was the High-Bailiff returning home--not knowing, of a truth, that his house had just been used as a meeting-place for conspirators. The hall-porter slept between two doors in the outer lobby. Lenora heard him scrambling out of bed, and the High-Bailiff's voice bidding him close everything up for the night. Then came the pushing home of bars and bolts and the rattle of chains, and finally the sound of the High-Bailiff's heavy footsteps across the hall and up the stairs.
After that silence once more.
Lenora, however, still sat on for awhile staring into the glow. Vaguely she wondered if Mark would be staying out all night, or whether he had been home all along, knowing perhaps, and perhaps not caring about, what was going on in his father's house; keeping aloof from it all: or like Laurence, up to his neck in all this treachery and abominable rebellion!
Another quarter-of-an-hour went by: the clock of St. Bavon had chimed the half after eleven, and now the quarter before midnight. Lenora felt that at last she might slip downstairs with safety.
Quickly now she took off her stuff gown and heavy farthingale which had so impeded her movements awhile ago, and groped in the press for a clinging robe which would envelop her closely and glide noiselessly upon the tiled floors.
There is absolutely no doubt that all through this time Lenora acted almost unconsciously. She never for one moment paused to think: she was impelled by a force which she herself could not have defined--a force which can best be described as a blind instinct. Obedience! She had been born and bred in obedience and a sense of sacred duty to her King as Sovereign Lord, to her faith and to her father.