"What if I should go alone, and you and the Comtesse go together, we meeting outside the French lines?"
"Ah, yes. That way! Yes, yes! What more? Tell me. Oh, tell me!"
Still speaking slowly, deliberately, so that she understood that he was thinking deeply as he spoke, that he was weighing carefully each word as it fell from his lips, he said:
"Your house is now deserted. There is no servitor there?"
"None," she answered, "excepting only the gardener, the old man you saw. He dwells in a little cottage some distance behind. What is your plan?"
"This. It may be best that I withdraw from the 'Gouden Leeuw.' I--I can leave it at dusk, as though with the intention of passing out of the city. The people of the house deem me a Frenchman, and therefore hate me. They will not regard my departure as strange; while, if it were well to confide in them, they would not betray me. It was so with the landlord at Antwerp who, in truth, saved me. It might be--would be so here, if needed. The French are their oppressors; they look to the English to save them from the French."
"And afterwards?" Sylvia asked almost breathlessly. "Afterwards?"
"I should not leave the city--then; but if, instead, I might find shelter in your house for some night or so----"
"Yet how will you live with none to minister to your wants? How support your horse?"
"I must confide in the gardener. He, like the rest here, is heart and soul for us, for the English. As for what remains to do, there shall be no light in the house at night, and I will lie close and snug all day. Thus Francbois will be deluded into the thought that I am gone. If he has hoped to gain aught by my presence here, he will soon learn that he has missed the mark."