For one moment she stood still at the open window, the night air on her face, and murmured a prayer. Then she climbed on to the window sill and out on to the ledge beyond. The first steps were easy, for she could hold on to the frame of the open window and edge herself along with her face to the wall and her back to the abyss below her.

But now the moment came when she must leave the window behind and must find support only in the stone work. Somehow she managed it. Moving very slowly, pressed so closely against the wall of the Villa that her breasts touched it, she edged herself forward inch by inch until her left hand could reach out and grasp the trellis.

She was relieved to find it was firm and fixed securely to the wall. She had anticipated that it would be, guessing that the Villa, like all the others in Monte Carlo, was new and that the wood would not have had time to rot nor the nails which held it to rust and loosen. Very, very carefully she put her foot from the stone ledge on to a bar of the trellis. Her wide, voluminous skirts were hampering her, but somehow she managed to control them.

The difficulty was that only the very tips of her toes, like the tips of her fingers, could find a place on which to hold, and her body had to be almost perfectly balanced with every step she took or she would have fallen backwards into the darkness.

The first few feet she climbed downwards were not as difficult as she had anticipated. Then she came to the roses and creepers and they made everything far more difficult. It seemed almost as if they defied her to find a foothold amongst them. They caught at the delicate gauze of her dress, ripping and tearing it as she tried to move, scratched her bare neck and arms, and more than once her foot slipped on a leafy shoot and she thought she must fall.

She had almost reached the ground when she heard a sound above her. It was a voice raised first in astonishment, then in anger. It grew louder and it seemed to her to have the frustrated snarl of a savage animal deprived of its prey.

She knew it was the Rajah who shouted and guessed that he was summoning his servants to go in search of her.

Desperately, knowing that even now she might lose her chance of freedom, Mistral tried no longer for a foothold, but jumped.