Harry laughed, and held back the twigs.
"That was a great success," he said. "And—O Geoffrey—if you have a spark of the romantic left in you, and I think you have, for you were a masterly red Indian, this ought to make it blaze. Look! a tunnel right down the hedge. Isn't that secret and heavenly? Think how many plots we might overhear, if people were only kind enough to make them as they went down the road! Think of the stirring rescues you could make, hiding here till the pursuit went by!"
Geoffrey was quite suitably impressed.
"I call this really ancestral," he said. "Talk low, Harry; we may be overheard. Where does it lead to?"
"Right down to the house, and comes out by another door like the one we went in by, just opposite the gun-room window. Geoff, if you'll conceal yourself here all to-morrow I'll bring your meals when I can slip away without attracting attention. You mustn't smoke, I'm afraid."
"Oh, if only there was the smallest cause for doing so!" said Geoff. "Does no one know it, except you and me?"
"I don't think so. I daren't ask Uncle Francis if he does, for fear he does. I shall tell Evie, but no one else. Lord! what a baby one is! Why does this give me pleasure? There! just peep out at the end, Geoffrey, so that if you are pursued from the house you will know where the door is; but be cautious. Now we'll walk up again inside, and steal softly out where we came in, else some one from the house might see us. No, I think not another match. It's too risky."
"I should like to give one low whistle," said Geoffrey.
"Just as a signal. All right."
Even as the whistle was on his lips, there came from somewhere close at hand a sudden gush of notes from a flute, and the two stood there huddled against each other in the narrow passage, petrified into sudden silence and immobility, but shaken with inward laughter. Peering, on tiptoe as it were, through the hedge, they could just make out the figure of Mr. Francis, walking airily along the grass border by the edge of the drive, on his way to the house. Soon his feet sounded crisp and distant on the gravel, and the two idiots breathed again.