"Yes," I whispered, and I could not help adding: "pity you came up!"
"I thought that I had better see him, in order to be able to say that I had," he whispered.
"You might have said it without actually seeing, you know, Aubrey."
"Hardly, I think, Arthur," said he.
I would not answer, for at the moment, I confess, I was a little impatient of Oxford and the academic stiff mind of the schoolmen. The ladder was gone! that was the point: and with it all seemed lost.
However, we presently started out eastward on hands and knees, until we entered some narrows beyond which there was no venturing; then, having turned, we once more went by Dees' window, who sent out to us some momentous hist, which we were in too much misery of mind to heed; and in the end, after somehow managing two danger-spots, we came out into forest at the castle-back. From that point we saw for the first time a light in the night, a light in a tiny window of the donjon—as to which Langler made the reckoning that it was burning either in or near the baron's laboratory.
We then walked up through the forest, got by stealth into the guest-court about two o'clock, and crept to our beds. I, however, could not sleep, but lay living over again all our night-bewitched adventure: the winds, the tremors and chances, seeing again the eyes and hearing the gasps of that poor, darksome prisoner, and thinking of the loss of the boat and of what that meant: for I knew that with the next ebb of the tide the boat would very likely be recovered by her owner, with our ladder tied to her, and with my jacket, waistcoat, and cap, and Langler's hat, in her! so that what we had been about would too probably soon be known in the castle and throughout the alp.