“Ah! Where?”
“In the Convent of course. That which gives light—not much of it either—to the cloister where the girl is confined. By a lucky chance my sister has learnt the particular one, and seen the window from the outside. It looks over the grounds where the nuns take recreation, now and then allowed intercourse with the school girls. She says it’s high up, but not higher than the top of the garden wall; so a ladder that will enable us to scale the one should be long enough to reach the other. I’m more dubious about the dimensions of the window itself. Kate describes it as only a small affair, with an upright bar in the middle—iron, she believes. Wood or iron, we may manage to remove that; but if the Herefordshire bacon has made your farmer’s daughter too big to screw herself through the aperture, then it’ll be all up a tree with us. However, we must find out before making the attempt to extract her. From what sister has told me, I fancy we can see the window from the Ramparts above. If so, we may make a distant measurement of it by guess work. Now,” continues the Major, coming to his programme of action, “what’s got to be done first is that your Wye boatman write a billet doux to his old sweetheart—in the terms I shall dictate to him. Then my sister must contrive, in some way, to put it in the girl’s hands, or see that she gets it.”
“And what after?”
“Well, nothing much after; only that we must make preparations for the appointment the waterman will make in his epistle.”
“It may as well be written now—may it not?”
“Certainly; I was just thinking of that. The sooner the better. Shall I call him in?”
“Do as you think proper, Mahon. I trust everything to you.”
The Major, rising, rings a bell; which brings Murtagh to the dining-room door.
“Murt, tell your guest in the kitchen, we wish a word with him.”
The face of the Irish soldier vanishes from view, soon after replaced by that of the Welsh waterman.