res. The
last of them fell off, baffled,--or afraid to go deeper into France. Now
he emerged again into the clear air and the starlight. The land beneath
him was a scudding blur, with a dark-green mass in its center, the
forest of La Fay.

And then, suddenly, he knew he must land if he were not to lose
consciousness and hurtle down blindly; and with set teeth and sweat
beading his forehead, he began the descent. At the end his strength
failed him. The plane crashed among the trees. "But Saint Denis, who
helps all Frenchmen, helped me,"--he smiled--"and I was thrown clear."

From that thicket where his machine lay hidden it was a mile to
Prezelay. He dragged himself over this distance, sometimes on his hands
and knees. Soon after dawn Marie-Jeanne, answering a discordant ringing,
found a man lying outside the gate and babbling deliriously, her
master's cousin, in a blood-soaked uniform, holding out a bundle of
papers, and begging her by the soul of her mother to put them in the
castle's secret hiding-place.

She did it. Then she coaxed the wounded man to the rooms opening from
the gallery and tended him day and night through the weeks of fever that
ensued. From his ravings she learned that he was in danger and feared
pursuers; and with the peasant's instinct for caution, she had not dared
to send for help.

"It was yesterday," the duke told us, "that my mind came back. I knew
then what must be thought of me, what must be said of me, all over
France." He was leaning on the wall now, exhausted and white, but
dauntless. "No matter for that--I have the papers. You recall the
hiding-place?"

He smiled as he asked the question, and Miss Falconer smiled back at
him. Getting to her feet, she ran her fingers across the oak panel over
his head, where for centuries a huntsman had been riding across a forest
glade and blowing his horn. The bundle of his hunting-knife protruded
just a little; and as the girl pressed it, the panel glided silently
open, revealing a space, square and dark and cobwebby.

Something was lying there, a thin, wafer-like packet of papers, the
papers for which the Firefly of France had shed his blood. She held them
up in triumph. But the duke was still smiling faintly. He thrust one
hand into his shirt and drew out a duplicate package, which he raised
for us to see.

"Behold!" he said. "They are copies. All that I sketched that night near
Ranceville, all that I wrote--I did not once, but twice. These