A Traitor's Wooing

by Headon Hill

Enid's active brain worked rapidly. The onion-seller had evidently got a bee in his bonnet which it was useless to try to disentangle. The salient fact stood out that Nugent had a project afoot for that night, in which all the principal actors in the Levison mystery, as enumerated by her father, were concerned, and of which her father would wish to be informed without delay. And here was she, his only possible informant, a prisoner without any prospect of release except at the hands of a cunning schemer who would have reason for preventing her from imparting the knowledge she had acquired. The action of "The Bootlace Man" in locking her in took a more sinister meaning by the light of what she had heard, and at the same time made her more than ever anxious to escape.

The suggestion that Violet Maynard's maid was the object of Nugent's machinations she dismissed with scorn, but that Leslie Chermside was to be "deported" in a steamer, either voluntarily or otherwise, was an item which ought to be under her father's consideration before it became an accomplished fact.

"I think that if I was out of this horrid place I could help you," she said. "Miss Maynard, the mistress of Louise, is a friend of mine. I would go to her and persuade her not to allow Louise any liberty to-night. Sailors are so clever, especially French sailors. I am sure that you will be able to hit upon some way of getting out."

The sun was low in the heavens, and inside the shrub-girt grotto it was scarcely possible to see the walls. Legros peered up at the little window, the top of which was just on a level with the eaves, where the slope of the roof began. Enid followed the direction of his glance, and pointed out that the aperture was not big enough for either of them to pass through. For answer Legros went and collected some of the patent fertilizer kegs, set them one upon the other under the window, and clambered up on to the topmost. By so doing he could easily reach with his hand the upper pane. It was already cracked, and, cautiously removing the broken glass, he thrust his arm through.

"From here I can make a hole in the roof big enough," he called down in a hoarse whisper. "It will take very long time to pick off the slates, they so firm fixed. But it the only way."

"Then, my dear good man, please begin at once," Enid urged him. "And don't make more noise than you can help in dislodging the slates, or we shall have that brute, or Mr. Nugent himself, round to stop us."

So she leaned against the mouldy wall and watched the laborious task with growing impatience, and in momentary dread lest the door should be flung open by the "bootlace man" or his employer. For though she was nearly certain that her companion of the grotto was a shedder of human blood her instinct told her that to her personally the forces controlled by Travers Nugent were far more dangerous.

The work of removing the roofing seemed interminable. The interior of the old stone building grew pitch-black before three of the slates had been displaced and gently tossed into the herbage. A distant clock in the town struck eight, nine, and ten and still Legros remained on his perch, toiling, with twisted body and arm crooked through the broken pane, in frantic endeavour to enlarge the opening.

At last the clock struck eleven, and before the half-hour the Frenchman slid nimbly to the floor.

"There, ma'amselle!" he panted after his exertions. "I t'ink there room now for you to pass through. For myself I shall have to make 'im one bit bigger. If you ready I give you what you call a 'and up."