mounted, but paused a moment, as he endeavoured to gauge the distance of the opposite wall, and gazed into the black gulf below. Bacri had told him that the space was six feet. In the darkness that now prevailed it appeared twenty. He would have ventured it in the circumstances had it been sixty!
Collecting all his energies and courage, he made a bound forward that might have roused the envy of an acrobat, and cleared not only the space between but the parapet beyond, coming down with an awful crash into the midst of a certain box-garden, which was the special pride of the owner of the mansion.
Poor Mariano leaped up in horror, and listened with dread, but suddenly remembering that he now stood on what Bacri had termed friendly ground, he recovered self-possession and sought for the door on the roof. Finding it after some trouble, he knocked gently.
It was opened much sooner and more violently than he had anticipated, and a tall man springing out seized him by the throat in a grasp like a vice, and held a gleaming dagger to his breast.
In other circumstances Mariano would certainly have engaged in a struggle for the dagger, but remembering Angela and the Jew's warning, he gave back, and said in French, as well as the vice-like grip would allow—
"A friend."
