Immediately, as my consciousness realised her, my hand instinctively went out to secure the weapon:  but she darted upon it, and was an instant before me.  I flew after her to wrench it away, but she flew, too:  and before I caught her, had thrown it cleanly through two rungs of the ladder and the window.  I dashed to the window, and after a hurried peer thought that I saw it below at the foot of a rock; away I flew to the stair-door, wrung open the lock, and down the stairs, three at a time, I ran to recover it.  I remember being rather surprised that she did not follow, forgetting all about the ladder.

But with a horrid shock I was reminded of it the moment I reached the bottom, before ever I had passed from the house:  for I heard the report of the weapon—­that crack, my God! and crying out:  ’Well, Lord, she has died for me, then!’ I tottered forward, and tumbled upon her, where she lay under the incline of the ladder in her blood.

* * * * *

That night! what a night it was! of fingers shivering with haste, of harum-scarum quests and searches, of groans, and piteous appeals to God.  For there were no surgical instruments, lint, anaesthetics, nor antiseptics that I knew of in the Chateau; and though I knew of a house in Montreux where I could find them, the distance was quite infinite, and the time an eternity in which to leave her all alone, bleeding to death; and, to my horror, I remembered that there was barely enough petrol in the motor, and the store usually kept in the house exhausted.  However, I did it, leaving her there unconscious on her bed:  but how I did it, and lived sane afterwards, that is another matter.

If I had not been a medical man, she must, I think, have died:  for the bullet had broken the left fifth rib, had been deflected, and I found it buried in the upper part of the abdominal wall.  I did not go from her bed-side:  I did not sleep, though I nodded and staggered:  for all things were nothing to me, but her:  and for a frightfully long time she remained comatose.  While she was still in this state I took her to a chalet beyond Villeneuve, three miles away on the mountain-side, a homely, but very salubrious place which I knew, imbedded in verdures, for I was desperate at her long collapse, and had hope in the higher air.  And there after three more days, she opened her eyes, and smiled with me.

It was then that I said to myself:  ’This is the noblest, sagest, and also the most loveable, of the creatures whom God has made in heaven or earth.  She has won my life, and I will live....  But at least, to save myself, I will put the broadest Ocean that there is between her and me:  for I wish to be a decent being, for the honour of my race, being the last, and to turn out trumps ... though I do love my dear, God knows....’

And thus, after only fifty-five days at the chalet, were we forced still further Westward.