Going very softly in my stockinged feet, and careful of my knowledge not to penetrate the thicket until close upon the appointed place, I reached my goal upon the stroke of the hour.
“Well!” whispered a voice from the starlight. “I could trust you.”
He had been stretched recumbent on the wall top, and now rose cautiously to my view, no longer the whitened fool, but the true Gogo of my affections. I looked up at him as from a well; and he swung his long stilts over, as he sat, so that they rested on the ground beneath.
“Quick!” he muttered; “without a moment lost—swarm! I can’t bend.”
Heaven knows how I did it—with no better show of grace than Lady Sophia, I fear. But somehow I scrambled up, until he could reach my hands, and haul me with a mighty power beside him. Then, once more, swing went his legs, and there was the ladder for my descent on the other side.
I clung to him convulsively; I kissed his hands; I could not refrain from sobbing.
“O, Gogo!” I said; “what you have saved me from—O, Gogo, what!”
His breath caught like a wounded lion’s.
“Not yet,” he whispered. “There is far to go first!”
“Put me down, then,” I answered, alert in the stress of things.