“I am so sorry!” she said. “I—I don't believe, Count Bunker, you are as guilty as father says!”
“I swear to you I am not!”
“Can I—help you?”
He thought swiftly.
“Is there any one about the house just now?”
“Oh yes; the keeper is stationed in the hall!”
“Miss Wallingford, if you would atone for a deep injury which you have inadvertently done an innocent man, bring me fifty feet of stout rope! And, I say, see that the door of the bicycle house is left unlocked. Will you do this?”
“I—I'll try.”
A sound on the stairs alarmed her, and with a fleeting smile of sympathy she was gone and the door locked upon him again.
Again the time passed slowly by, and he was left to ponder over the critical nature of the situation as revealed by the luckless Baron's intelligence. Clearly he must escape to-night, at all hazards.