fair, from all that men call honor; fled, to leave
his name disgraced in the service he adored; fled, to leave the world
to think him a guilty dastard who dared not face his trial; fled, to bid
his closest friend believe him low sunk in the depths of foulest felony,
branded forever with a criminal's shame--by his own act, by his own
hand. Flight!--it has bitter pangs that make brave men feel cowards
when they fly from tyranny and danger and death to a land of peace and
promise; but in his flight he left behind him all that made life worth
the living, and went out to meet eternal misery; renouncing every hope,
yielding up all his future.

"It is for her sake--and his," he thought; and without a moment's pause,
without a backward look he ran, as the stag runs with the bay of the
pack behind it, down into the shadows of the night.

The hue and cry was after him; the tumult of a crowd's excitement,
raised it knows not why or wherefore, was on his steps, joined with the
steadier and keener pursuit of men organized for the hunter's work, and
trained to follow the faintest track, the slightest clew. The moon was
out, and they saw him clearly, though the marvelous fleetness of his
stride had borne him far ahead in the few moments' start he had gained.
He heard the beat of their many feet on the stones, the dull thud of
their running, the loud clamor of the mob, the shrill cries of the
Hebrew offering gold with frantic lavishness to whoever should stop
his prey. All the breathless excitation, all the keen and desperate
straining, all the tension of the neck-and-neck struggle that he had
known so often over the brown autumn country of the Shires at home, he
knew now, intensified to horror, made deadly with despair, changed into
a race for life and death.

Yet, with it the wild blood in him woke; the recklessness of peril,
the daring and defiant courage that lay beneath his levity and languor
heated his veins and spurred his strength; he was ready to die if they
chose to slaughter him; but for his freedom he strove as men will strive
for life; to distance them, to escape them, he would have breathed his
last at the goal; they might fire him down, if they would, but he swore
in his teeth to die free.

Some Germans in his path, hearing the shouts that thundered after him
in the night, drew their mule-cart across the pent-up passage-way down
which he turned, and blocked the narrow road. He saw it in time; a
second later, and it