s friend touched me not a
little. Besides, I knew that I was treading on slippery ground: that it
behoved me to be careful.

'I will do it,' I said after a moment's reflection. 'He will play me no
tricks, I suppose? A letter of--'

'MON DIEU, no! He will understand,' Cocheforet answered eagerly. 'You
will not repent it. Let us be going.'

'Well, but my horse?' I said, somewhat taken aback by this extreme
haste. 'How am I to--'

'We shall overtake it,' he assured me. 'It will have kept the road.
Lectoure is no more than a league from here, and we can give orders
there to have these two fetched and buried.'

I had nothing to gain by demurring, and so, after another word or two,
it was arranged. We picked up what we had dropped, M. de Cocheforet
helped his sister to mount, and within five minutes we were gone.
Casting a glance back from the skirts of the wood I fancied that I saw
the masked man straighten himself and turn to look after us, but the
leaves were beginning to intervene, the distance may have cheated
me. And yet I was not indisposed to think the unknown a trifle more
observant, and a little less seriously hurt, than he seemed.

CHAPTER XIII. AT THE FINGER-POST

Through all, it will have been noticed, Mademoiselle had not spoken to
me, nor said one word, good or bad. She had played her part grimly,
had taken defeat in silence if with tears, had tried neither prayer nor
defence nor apology. And the fact that the fight was now over, and the
scene left behind, made no difference in her conduct. She kept her face
studiously turned from me, and affected to ignore my presence. I caught
my horse feeding by the roadside, a furlong forward, and mounted and
fell into place behind the two, as in the morning. And just as we had
plodded on then in silence we plodded on now; almost as if nothing
had happened; while I wondered at the unfathomable ways of women,
and marvelled that she could take part in such an incident and remain
unchanged.

Yet, though she strove to hide it, it had made a change in her. Though
her mask served her well it could not entirely hide her emotions; and
by-and-by I marked that her head drooped, that she rode listlessly, that
the lines of her figure were altered. I noticed that she had flung away,
or furtively dropped, her riding-whip; and I began to understand that,
far from the fight having set me in my former place, to the old hatred
of me were now added shame and vexation on her own