“You are at perfect liberty to scream to your heart's content. There is no one here who will mind in the least. You are also at perfect liberty to make what efforts at escape you choose. I fear that you will only find them futile.”
He went out quickly and closed the door after him. Kathleen, listening in the badly-lighted room, could hear a key grate in the lock and bolts shot in both at the top and the bottom of the door.
Quickly and methodically she made an examination of her prison. She looked into the cupboards and into the drawers and the massive bureau. But there was nothing about the room of the remotest interest to her which offered the faintest suggestion, sinister or otherwise.
It was, indeed, only when she looked out of the windows, of which there were three, that she discovered to the full how utterly helpless was her position.
The window on the south side was apparently over the window of the dining-room, and, as she peeped over the sill, looked sheer down the face of the precipice beneath her.
The west window, she found, looked down into a stone courtyard, while the window on the east overhung the pond. Apparently she was imprisoned in a tower.
When Melun had reached the ground floor he sought out Mme. Estelle.
“I have not had much opportunity of saying anything to you,” he remarked as he entered the room in which she was sitting, “but I should like to tell you now how splendidly you have done.”
Madame was restless and ill at ease.
“If I had seen that girl before to-day,” she said, “I should never have brought her here.”