“What time is it, monsieur?”

“Ten after nine.  In an hour precisely the moon will rise.”

“It will be in this hour of darkness, then...”

A bend in the road blotted out the stationary lights of the limousine.  There was no tail-light visible on the road before them.  Lanyard touched Jules on the shoulder.

“Switch off your lights,” he said—­“all of them.  Then find a place where we can turn off and wait till Leon and Marthe pass us.”

In sudden blindness the car moved on slowly, groping its way for a few hundred yards.  Then Jules picked out the mouth of a narrow lane, overshadowed by dense foliage, ran past, stopped, and backed into it.

In four minutes by Lanyard’s watch the pulse of the limousine began to beat upon the stillness of that sleepy countryside.  A blue-white glare like naked and hungry steel leapt quivering past the bend, swept in a wide arc as the lamps themselves became visible, and lay horizontal with the road as the car bored past.

“Evidently Leon feels quite lost without us,” Lanyard commented.  “Shoot, Jules—­follow his rear lamp, and don’t cut out your muffler.  Can you manage without headlights for a while?”

“I drove an ambulance for four years, sir.”

The car swung out into the main highway.  Far ahead the red sardonic eye in the rear of the limousine leered as if mocking their hopes of keeping it in sight.  Jules, however, proved unresentful; and he was marvellously competent.

“To anybody who’s ever piloted a load of casualties through eighteen inches of mud, dodging shell holes and shells on their way to make new holes, in a black rainstorm at midnight—­this sort of thing,” Jules announced—­“a hard, smooth road under a clear sky—­is simple pie.”

So it may have seemed to him.  But to Lanyard and Liane Delorme, hurled along a road they could not see at anywhere from forty to sixty miles an hour, with no manner of guidance other than an elusive tail-lamp which was forever whisking round corners and remaining invisible till Jules found his way round in turn, by instinct or second sight or intuition—­whatever it was, it proved unfailing—­it was a nervous time.

And there was half an hour of it...

They were swooping down a long grade with a sharp turn at the bottom, as they knew from the fact that the red eye had just winked out, somewhere on ahead, there sounded a grinding crash, the noise of a stout fabric rent and crushed with the clash and clatter of shivered glass.

“Easy,” Lanyard cautioned—­“and ready with the lights!”

Both warnings were superfluous.  Jules had already disengaged the gears.  Gravity carried the car round the curve, slowly, smoothly, silently; under constraint of its brakes it slid to a pause on a steep though brief descent, and hung there like an animal poised to spring, purring softly.

Below, at the foot of the hill, the headlights of another car, standing at some distance and to the right of the road, furnished lurid illumination to the theatre of disaster.