“Good-bye?” faltered Frank.
“Yes, while I can speak to you. Quick! a soldier’s good-bye. That will do; now out after me.”
Sir Robert’s “good-bye” was a firm grip of his son’s hand, and then he crept out on to the roof; Frank followed him, his heart throbbing with excitement; and as he stepped out he could hear voices down below in the garden beneath the drawing-room windows.
Frank shivered a little, for he felt sure that they would be seen against the sky, in spite of their precaution of leaning toward the sloping roof, and he fully expected to hear the report of muskets; but the shiver was more due to excitement than fear.
“They would not be able to hit us on a night like this, while we are moving,” he said to himself; and with a strange feeling of wild exhilaration, he followed the dark figure before him, climbing across the low walls which separated house from house, and finding it easy enough to walk along in the narrow path-like space of leaded roof, which extended from the bottom of the slate slope to the low parapet with its stone coping, beyond which nothing was visible but the tops of the trees in the Park.
They must have passed over the roofs of twenty houses before Sir Robert stopped; and, as Frank crept up close to him, he put his lips to the boy’s ear.
“It’s a drop of ten feet to the next house,” he said. “Must go down from here.”
A sensation of dread did now attack Frank, as he thought of the descent of a heavy man by the frail rope. If it had been he who was to go down, it would have been different, and he would have felt no hesitation.
Catching at his father’s arm, he whispered:
“Are you sure that it will bear you?”