The room which had been allotted to him was high up in the eastern tower. It was a nice room, but to one in Agravaine’s state of supressed suspicion a trifle too solidly upholstered. The door was of the thickest oak, studded with iron nails. Iron bars formed a neat pattern across the only window.
Hardly had Agravaine observed these things when the door opened, and before him stood the damsel Yvonne, pale of face and panting for breath.
She leaned against the doorpost and gulped.
“Fly!” she whispered.
Reader, if you had come to spend the night in the lonely castle of a perfect stranger with a shifty eye and a rogues’ gallery smile, and on retiring to your room had found the door kick-proof and the window barred, and if, immediately after your discovery of these phenomena, a white-faced young lady had plunged in upon you and urged you to immediate flight, wouldn’t that jar you?
It jarred Agravaine.
“Eh?” he cried.
“Fly! Fly, Sir Knight.”
Another footstep sounded in the passage. The damsel gave a startled look over her shoulder.
“And what’s all this?”
Earl Dorm appeared in the dim-lit corridor. His voice had a nasty tinkle in it.
“Your-your daughter,” said Agravaine, hurriedly, “was just telling me that breakfast would-”
The sentence remained unfinished. A sudden movement of the earl’s hand, and the great door banged in his face. There came the sound of a bolt shooting into its socket. A key turned in the lock. He was trapped.
Outside, the earl had seized his daughter by the wrist and was administering a paternal cross-examination.
“What were you saying to him?”
Yvonne did not flinch.
“I was bidding him fly.”
“If he wants to leave this castle,” said the earl, grimly, “he’ll have to.”
“Father,” said Yvonne, “I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“I can’t.”
His grip on her wrist tightened. From the other side of the door came the muffled sound of blows on the solid oak.
“Oh?” said Earl Dorm. “You can’t, eh? Well. listen to me. You’ve got to. Do you understand? I admit he might be better-looking, but-”
“Father, I love him.”
He released her wrist, and stared at her in the uncertain light.
“You love him!”
“Yes.”
“Then what-? Why? Well, I never did understand women,” he said at last, and stumped off down the passage.
While this cryptic conversation was in progress, Agravaine, his worst apprehensions realized, was trying to batter down the door. After a few moments, however, he realized the futility of his efforts, and sat down on the bed to think.
At the risk of forfeiting the reader’s respect, it must be admitted that his first emotion was one of profound relief. If he was locked up like this, it must mean that that dragon story was fictitious, and that all danger was at an end of having to pit his inexperience against a ravening monster who had spent a lifetime devouring knights. He had never liked the prospect, though he had been prepared to go through with it, and to feel that it was definitely cancelled made up for a good deal.
His mind next turned to his immediate future. What were they going to do with him? On this point he felt tolerably comfortable. This imprisonment could mean nothing more than that he would be compelled to disgorge a ransom. This did not trouble him. He was rich, and, now that the situation had been switched to a purely business basis, he felt that he could handle it.
In any case, there was nothing to be gained by sitting up, so he went to bed, like a good philosopher.
The sun was pouring through the barred window when he was awoke by the entrance of a gigantic figure bearing food and drink.
He recognized him as one of the scurvy knaves who had dined at the bottom of the room the night before-a vast, beetle-browed fellow with a squint, a mop of red hair, and a genius for silence. To Agravaine’s attempts to engage him in conversation he replied only with grunts, and in a short time left the room, closing and locking the door behind him.
He was succeeded at dusk by another of about the same size and ugliness, and with even less conversational élan. This one did not even grunt.
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