of victorious contempt. A crash. She had hurled the lamp to the floor and was past him, missing his sword point by just half an inch. The blade quivered in the woodwork. Half-mad, he grabbed at her mask--it came off--but she was gone.
“We shall meet again,” she called, “your business and mine I hope does not end here.” A spurt of flame shot into his eyes. The oil of the exploded lamp had set the dry, rotten timbers ablaze, and the kitchen was alight. Quick as thought André hurled himself after the girl. She had doubled to the right--there was another door as he guessed leading to the back--she was through it and he after her, snatching
at her figure in the pitchy darkness. For two seconds, he held her cloak--she twisted out of it--and he fell back with a curse against the wall. She had escaped.
And now the flame from the kitchen revealed Captain Statham standing in the front doorway, stupefied, his eyes glaring like a madman’s. With a cry, he flung himself on André. A cold pain in his left arm--André was stabbed--but this was no moment for vengeance, only for flight, for on his escape hung the safety and honour of France. He rushed into the open at the back. To find his horse--to find his horse!
“I have seen her,” he heard Statham crying as he whipped round the cabin. It would be a race across the clearing now, for Statham’s companion must be waiting on the other side, and in the roar of flame it would be as light as day in this grisly thicket. What if his horse were not there? Two to one then. Bah! should he turn to meet them as it was? No, the papers--the papers first--vengeance would follow later.
For one second André crouched behind the hut. Ah! there was his horse--there was the other officer twenty paces off. Could he do it? He must.
“_Jésu!_” came the words in the voice of George Onslow as André doubled round the corner, “it is the Vicomte, Statham; we are betrayed. This way for God’s sake--ha!”
Crack went Onslow’s pistol. André had leaped across the clearing. He had missed, but the flash almost singed André’s hair.
One slash of his sword and his horse was free.
“Good-night, gentlemen,” he shouted in victorious bravado, “we shall meet tomorrow. _Mes saluts et au revoir!_”
In went the spurs and his maddened horse was bursting through the wood. Another pistol shot, and they were after him, but he had a good start and he knew that no beast alive could overhaul the beautiful blood mare he had bought in England. A roar of flame behind him--the crack of the wood--two pistol bullets singing through the swirling raw air--a ghastly vision of that half-naked man and woman in the horror of the clotted grass, his horse’s hoofs stamping out the dead woman’s face as she lay where he had left her--a ride as of devil-tormented goblins through the pains of 

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