He stopped on that word as if the word choked him—­stopped, struggling with his passion.  At last, with a half-stifled oath, he flung away from her, halted and hung a moment, then, with a swing of rage, went off again violently.  His feet as he strode along the river-bank trampled the flowers, and slew the pale water forget-me-not, which grew among the grasses.

CHAPTER XXIII.  A MIND, AND NOT A MIND.

La Tribe tore through the thicket, imagining Carlat and Count Hannibal hot on his heels.  He dared not pause even to listen.  The underwood tripped him, the lissom branches of the alders whipped his face and blinded him; once he fell headlong over a moss-grown stone, and picked himself up groaning.  But the hare hard-pushed takes no account of the briars, nor does the fox heed the mud through which it draws itself into covert.  And for the time he was naught but a hunted beast.  With elbows pinned to his sides, or with hands extended to ward off the boughs, with bursting lungs and crimson face, he plunged through the tangle, now slipping downwards, now leaping upwards, now all but prostrate, now breasting a mass of thorns.  On and on he ran, until he came to the verge of the wood, saw before him an open meadow devoid of shelter or hiding-place, and with a groan of despair cast himself flat.  He listened.  How far were they behind him?

He heard nothing—­nothing, save the common noises of the wood, the angry chatter of a disturbed blackbird as it flew low into hiding, or the harsh notes of a flock of starlings as they rose from the meadow.  The hum of bees filled the air, and the August flies buzzed about his sweating brow, for he had lost his cap.  But behind him—­nothing.  Already the stillness of the wood had closed upon his track.

He was not the less panic-stricken.  He supposed that Tavannes’ people were getting to horse, and calculated that, if they surrounded and beat the wood, he must be taken.  At the thought, though he had barely got his breath, he rose, and keeping within the coppice crawled down the slope towards the river.  Gently, when he reached it, he slipped into the water, and stooping below the level of the bank, his head and shoulders hidden by the bushes, he waded down stream until he had put another hundred and fifty yards between himself and pursuit.  Then he paused and listened.  Still he heard nothing, and he waded on again, until the water grew deep.  At this point he marked a little below him a clump of trees on the farther side; and reflecting that that side—­if he could reach it unseen—­would be less suspect, he swam across, aiming for a thorn bush which grew low to the water.  Under its shelter he crawled out, and, worming himself like a snake across the few yards of grass which intervened, he stood at length within the shadow of the trees.  A moment he paused to shake himself, and then, remembering that he was still within a mile of the camp, he set off, now walking, and now running in the direction of the hills which his party had crossed that morning.