She allowed herself this doubt, which was an encouragement, while dragging the young man up to the topmost floor of the theater, far, very far from the trapdoors.

“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.