The baroness, still wearing her black cloak, threw open the window of the sitting room, and, her room in darkness, looked across the bay at the white yacht, which she could just make out in the gloom.
“They ought to be here soon,� she murmured, as she placed the glass cylinder in its steel case. “I won’t send another signal. It might be caught by somebody else. Besides, it is not necessary.�
She was right. It was not necessary to signal her men on the yacht, gently rocking some two miles from shore.
On the other hand, it was nearly an hour before her ear caught the subdued thumping of muffled oars.
“They have to row slowly,� she said to herself. “That’s so. Even with oars muffled, they might be heard if they came too fast.�
A soft whistle came from below as the laboring of the oars in their padded rowlocks ceased.
Looking out of the window, she could just discern a dark patch on the water immediately beneath.
She did not reply to the whistle. Instead, she drew from under her cloak a coil of thin, tough wire. On one end of it was a leaden weight, like a large fishing-line sinker.
Dropping the leaden sinker over the sill, she paid out the wire until the weight dropped into the sea. She knew just how far this was by a scrap of red ribbon she had the night before tied on the wire at a certain spot, when she had measured the distance from her window to the water.
Three sharp tugs at the wire told her that the other end had been found by the men in the boat. She began to pull the wire back, and soon she had the end of a thick, strong silken rope which had been attached to the end of the wire with a well-made sailor’s knot.