At lunch-time they parted. After the meal, Raoul superintended the departure of the char-à-bancs, which were taking all the staff of the Manor to Clisson, then he took his way to the pool where he saw Dorothy's little troupe hard at work on the bank. The captain, always the man of affairs, was running to and fro somewhat in the manner of a Gugusse. The others were carrying out exactly Dorothy's instructions.
When it was all over, a sufficiently thick iron wire was stretched above the lake at a height of ten or twelve feet, fastened at one end to the gable of a barn, at the other to a ring affixed to a rock among the hillocks.
"Hang it all!" he said. "It looks to me as if you'd made preparations for one of your circus turns."
"You're right," she replied gayly. "Having no aëroplane I fall back on my aërial rope-walking."
"What? Is that what you intend to do?" he exclaimed in anxious accents. "But you're bound to fall."
"I can swim."
"No, no. I refuse to allow it."
"By what right?"
"You haven't even a balancing-pole."
"A balancing-pole?" she said, running off. "And what next? A net? A safety-rope?"