o recall me to
the consciousness of duty.

When I saw how it was I did not lose time in indecision. The old
classical conflict of love and honour being once fairly before me, it
did not cost me a thought. I was a Saint-Yves de Keroual; and I decided
to strike off on the morrow for Wakefield and Burchell Fenn, and embark,
as soon as it should be morally possible, for the succour of my
downtrodden fatherland and my beleaguered Emperor. Pursuant on this
resolve, I leaped from bed, made a light, and as the watchman was crying
half-past two in the dark streets of Lichfield, sat down to pen a letter
of farewell to Flora. And then--whether it was the sudden chill of the
night, whether it came by association of ideas from the remembrance of
Swanston Cottage, I know not, but there appeared before me--to the
barking of sheep-dogs--a couple of snuffy and shambling figures, each
wrapped in a plaid, each armed with a rude staff; and I was immediately
bowed down to have forgotten them so long, and of late to have thought
of them so cavalierly.

Sure enough, there was my errand! As a private person I was neither
French nor English; I was something else first; a loyal gentleman, an
honest man. Sim and Candlish must not be left to pay the penalty of my
unfortunate blow. They held my honour tacitly pledged to succour them;
and it is a sort of stoical refinement entirely foreign to my nature to
set the political obligation above the personal and private. If France
fell in the interval for the lack of Anne de Saint-Yves, fall she must!
But I was both surprised and humiliated to have had so plain a duty
bound upon me for so long--and for so long to have neglected and
forgotten it. I think any brave man will understand me when I say that I
went to bed and to sleep with a conscience very much relieved, and woke
again in the morning with a light heart. The very danger of the
enterprise reassured me; to save Sim and Candlish (suppose the worst to
come to the worst) it would be necessary for me to declare myself in a
court of justice, with consequences which I did not dare to dwell upon;
it could never be said that I had chosen the cheap and the easy--only
that in a very perplexing competition of duties I had risked my life for
the most immediate.

We resumed the journey with more diligence: thenceforward posted day and
night; did not halt beyond what was necessary for meals; and the
postillions were excited by gratuities, after the habit of