unning blow, and for some moments I lay dizzy and confused, daring
hardly to breathe, and conscious only of a burning and blistering agony
in my right hand.

At length I summoned courage to gather my limbs together and crawl out
the way I had entered. The distance was but a few paces, yet to traverse
these seemed an interminable nightmare of swaying and stumbling. I know
only one other occasion upon which the liberal atmosphere of the open
earth seemed sweeter to my senses when I reached it than it did on this.

I tumbled somehow through the cleft, and sat down, shaking, upon the
grass of the slope beyond; but, happening to throw myself backwards in
the reeling faintness induced by my fright and the pain of my head, my
eyes encountered a sight that woke me at once to full activity.

Balanced upon the very verge of the slope, his face and neck craned
forward, his jaw dropped, a sick, tranced look upon his features, stood
Camille. I saw him topple, and shouted to him; but before my voice was
well out, he swayed, collapsed, and came down with a running thud that
shook the ground. Once he wheeled over, like a shot rabbit, and, bounding
thwack with his head against a flat boulder not a dozen yards from me,
lay stunned and motionless.

I scrambled to him, quaking all over. His breath came quick, and a spirt
of blood jerked from a sliced cut in his forehead at every pump of his
heart.

I kicked out a wad of cool moist turf, and clapped it in a pad over the
wound, my handkerchief under. For his body, he was shaken and bruised,
but otherwise not seriously hurt.

Presently he came to himself; to himself in the best sense of the
word--for Camille was sane.

I have no explanation to offer. Only I know that, as a fall will set a
long-stopped watch pulsing again, the blow here seemed to have restored
the misplaced intellect to its normal balance.

When he woke, there was a new soft light of sanity in his eyes that was
pathetic in the extreme.

"Monsieur," he whispered, "the terror has passed."

"God be thanked! Camille," I answered, much moved.

He jerked his poor battered head in reverence.

"A little while," he said, "and I shall know. The punishment was just."

"What punishment, my poor Camille?"

"Hush! The cloud has rolled away. I stand naked before _le bon Dieu_.
Monsieur, lift me up; I am strong."

I winced as I complied. The palm of my hand was scorched and blistered in
a dozen places. He noticed at once, an