hich in its heavy shade was an impenetrable gloom,
while the twisted wooden pillars ran upward to the gallery, loggia-like.
With rapid perception and intuition he divined rather than saw these
things, and, swinging himself up with noiseless lightness, he threw
himself full-length down on the rough flooring of the balcony. If
they passed he was safe, for a brief time more at least; if they found
him--his teeth clinched like a mastiff's where he lay--he had the
strength in him still to sell his life dearly.

The pursuers came closer and closer, and by the clamors that floated up
in indistinct and broken fragments, he knew that they had tracked him.
He heard the tramp of their feet as they came under the loggia; he
heard the click of the pistols--they were close upon him at last in the
blackness of night.

CHAPTER XII.

THE KING'S LAST SERVICE.

"Is he up there?" asked a voice in the darkness.

"Not likely. A cat couldn't scramble up that woodwork," answered a
second.

"Send a shot, and try," suggested a third.

There he lay, stretched motionless on the flat roof of the veranda. He
heard the words as the thronging mob surged, and trampled, and swore,
and quarreled, beneath him, in the blackness of the gloom; balked of
their prey, and savage for some amends. There was a moment's pause--a
hurried, eager consultation; then he heard the well-known sound of a
charge being rammed down, and the sharp drawing out of a ramrod; there
was a flash, a report, a line of light flamed a second in his sight; a
ball hissed past him with a loud, singing rush, and bedded itself in the
timber, a few inches above his uncovered hair. A dead silence followed;
then the muttering of many voices broke out afresh.

"He's not there, at any rate," said one, who seemed the chief; "he
couldn't have kept as still as that with a shot so near him. He's made
for the open country and the forest, I'll take my oath."

Then the trending of many feet trampled their way out from beneath the
loggia; their voices and their rapid steps grew fainter and fainter as
they hurried away through the night. For a while, at least, he was safe.

For some moments he lay prostrated there; the rushing of the blood on
his brain, the beating of his heart, the panting of his breath, the
quivering of his limbs after the intense muscular effort he had gone
through, mastered him and flung him down there, beaten and powerless.
He felt the foam on his lips and he thought