Simone was waiting on the landing, and as her mistress crept into the room she noiselessly barred the door. Marion sank on the bed, breathing unevenly, her face showing the strain she had undergone. Simone held a glass of water to her lips. She drank eagerly, then buried her face in the coverlet.

Along the passage without went the heavy steps of the courier. Simone was seized with a sudden horror as she realised how near success had run to failure. Success? She looked at the bowed head. Gently she took up the trembling hands.

''Tis he,' came the broken whisper. 'He is in Exeter gaol—condemned. 'Twas to Jeffreys, yonder letter, saying that the prisoner, Roger Trevannion—' Marion's whisper became almost inaudible—'had been found guilty of lending aid and sustenance to the King's enemies and should rightly be hanged. But I can't remember the exact words—the Governor said that seeing the prisoner was a man of note ... he wondered if—if—' Marion's words stumbled, and Simone bent low. 'If,' finished the girl with a sudden burst of bitter, contemptuous anger, 'my lord Jeffreys' well-known clemency would not dictate another—another sentence. I can't remember the rest. Already I would that I could forget what I have remembered.'

The flame died away as Marion's voice sank into silence. The russet gold head drooped forward. For several minutes neither moved.

After a time Simone knelt down and gently examined her mistress's feet. The stockings were cut here and there, but the skin was unbroken. Presently she coaxed Marion to allow herself to be undressed. Marion got up and sat down mechanically as the deft hands did their work, and finally crept into the sweet, lavender-scented bed.

'Try to sleep, Mademoiselle,' said Simone, bending over the pillow to stroke the waving hair from the forehead. 'You will need all your strength.'

'Ay,' said Marion dully, 'all my strength and yours, and all my wits and yours. I have not time to sleep. I must think. There is one thing for which we cannot be sufficiently thankful: we are nearing Exeter. To-morrow night, with speed, should see us there, at the end of the journey, but,' she continued in a voice that matched her haggard face, 'at the beginning of a worse thing—a race with time. Get you to bed, Simone, and to-morrow——'

'Hist!' whispered the other, as a heavy stockinged tread sounded in the passage and the boards creaked outside the door, 'yonder comes our bodyguard. We had best be silent.'

Soon the steady snores came to their ears. The innkeeper moved about in a further room; then silence fell on the house.

Presently, Marion sat up in bed, her arms round her knees. Simone still crouched by her side.

'Have I ever said aught of my Aunt Keziah?' she whispered.

'No, Mademoiselle.'

'She lives in Exeter.'

Simone's face lighted up. Her hands clasped each other. 'Oh, Mademoiselle, what amazing good fortune!'

'Why? I had rather lodged at the New Inn. Being in my aunt's house I shall be obliged to tell her everything. But I dare not go to the inn; she would find out, it being almost next door to my aunt's house. It all depends whether she will be friend or foe.'

'Is Madame your aunt at all like Lady Fairfax?'

'In looks, yes.'

'A second Lady Fairfax had been an ally, Mademoiselle. But—but—Madame your aunt may have influential friends.'

A ghost of a smile flickered over Marion's face.

'Or enemies. She makes rare enemies, my Aunt Keziah. I have only been to the house once, when I was eight. 'Twas the first coach ride I had ever had. Then my aunt quarrelled with my father about my upbringing, and I never saw her again until this year when she came to Garth. I remember the house, in the High Street, near the East Gate.'

A question burned on Simone's lips. Presently Marion unconsciously answered it. 'I do not in the least know where—where the gaol is.'

For close on an hour the two whispered together, Marion finding a temporary relief in going over and over again the possibilities of the situation. Presently she fell silent, her face showing haggard in the candle-light.

'There's one thing,' she said at the last. 'Now something has got to be done. Only one more day in that hateful coach, sitting idle. I have thought and thought and thought; for four days I have sat thinking. There will be to-morrow for thinking again. Then——'

Presently, Marion lay quiet and Simone put out the candle and turned to her own little pallet bed. The moon swung clear above the sloping land, the silver beams creeping through the cracks of the shuttered window. Out in the lane rose suddenly the full-throated song of the nightingale, answering another across the valley. With a stifled moan Marion buried her face in the pillow.

Simone, undressing in the darkness, shed bitter tears, and for a long time she crouched by her chair, summoning remembrance of those two, one near and one distant, to a Presence where remembrance would be availing. The June night went up in beauty; the world lay bathed in an exceeding peace. But Marion tossed to and fro in the darkness, counting the minutes of each endless hour.

Just about sunset the following evening the coach wound down the valley and entered Exeter by the East Gate. Zacchary's reluctance to speed up the horses had been overborne, not so much by Marion's words as her looks. It dawned on the old man that his beloved mistress must be ailing. Tony the watchful confirmed his suspicions. If the mistress had an aunt in Exeter, said the Londoner, 'twas nothing short of a providence they should be so near to the town, for to his way of thinking the young lady was sickening for a fever. Zacchary said no more.

Mistress Keziah was sitting down to supper in the low, lattice-windowed room that looked out on the courtyard. Beyond the flagged stretch rose high, creeper-covered walls, in which the great oaken entrance doors were set. The house was a rambling, gabled building, with a garden at the rear, which was only kept in order because of Mistress Keziah's sense of duty to her forbears. Rarely she walked therein; only part of the large house was inhabited, Mistress Keziah loving to spend the greater part of her income on her visits to Bath, where she lived some months of each year in state and splendour.

The sound of horses and wheels, and the clang of the courtyard bell, roused in her a lively curiosity. Quickly she thought of the few folk in the neighbourhood who might p............