le that I sprang down,
and, running round her horse's head, was just in time to catch her as
she fell. She was not quite unconscious then, for as I supported her,
she cried out,--

'Do not touch me! Do not touch me! You kill me with shame!'

But as she spoke she clung to me; and I made no mistake. Those words
made me happy. I carried her to the bank, my heart on fire, and laid her
against it just as M. de Cocheforet rode up. He sprang from his horse,
his eyes blazing, 'What is this?' he cried. 'What have you been saying
to her, man?'

'She will tell you,' I answered drily, my composure returning under his
eye. 'Amongst other things, that you are free. From this moment, M.
de Cocheforet, I give you back your parole, and I take my own honour.
Farewell.'

He cried out something as I mounted, but I did not stay to heed or
answer. I dashed the spurs into my horse, and rode away past the
cross-roads, past the finger-post; away with the level upland stretching
before me, dry, bare, almost treeless; and behind me, all I loved. Once,
when I had gone a hundred yards, I looked back and saw him standing
upright against the sky, staring after me across her body. And again a
minute later I looked back. This time saw only the slender wooden cross,
and below it a dark blurred mass.

CHAPTER XIV. ST MARTIN'S EVE

It was late evening on the twenty-ninth of November when I rode into
Paris through the Orleans gate. The wind was in the north-east, and a
great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry sunset. The air seemed
to be heavy with smoke, the kennels reeked, my gorge rose at the city's
smell; and with all my heart I envied the man who had gone out of it by
the same gate nearly two months before, with his face to the south and
the prospect of riding day after day and league after league across
heath and moor and pasture. At least he had had some weeks of life
before him, and freedom and the open air, and hope and uncertainty;
while I came back under doom, and in the pall of smoke that hung over
the huddle of innumerable roofs saw a gloomy shadowing of my own fate.

For make no mistake. A man in middle life does not strip himself of
the worldly habit with which experience has clothed him, does not run
counter to all the hard saws and instances by which he has governed his
course so long, without shiverings and doubts and horrible misgivings,
and struggles of heart. At least a dozen times between the Loire and
Paris I as