“I shall hide you in some unknown corner of the world, where he can not come to look for you. You will be safe; and then I shall go away … as you have sworn never to marry.”
Christine seized Raoul’s hands and squeezed them with incredible rapture. But, suddenly becoming alarmed again, she turned away her head.
“Higher!” was all she said. “Higher still!”
And she dragged him up toward the summit.
He had a difficulty in following her. They were soon under the very roof, in the maze of timber-work. They slipped through the buttresses, the rafters, the joists; they ran from beam to beam as they might have run from tree to tree in a forest.
And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should.
As for Raoul, he saw nothing either; for, when he had Christine in front of him, nothing interested him that happened behind.