“Come here, my son, and let me embrace you, and bestow my blessing.”

Gaston hesitated.

“Come,” insisted the old man in broken tones, “I must embrace you for the last time:  I may never see you again.  Save yourself, save your name, Gaston, and then—­you know how I love you, my son:  take back the jewels.  Come.”

For an instant the father and son clung to each other, overpowered by emotion.

But the continued noise at the gates now reaches their ears.

“We must part!” said M. de Clameran, “go!” And, taking from his desk a little pair of pistols, he handed them to his son, and added, with averted eyes, “You must not be captured alive, Gaston!”

Gaston did not immediately descend to the park.

He yearned to see Valentine, and give her one last kiss before leaving France, and determined to persuade Pilorel to stop the boat as they went by the park of La Verberie.

He hastened to his room, placed the signal in the window so that Valentine might know he was coming, and waited for an answering light.

“Come, M. Gaston,” entreated old St. Jean, who could not understand the strange conduct.  “For God’s sake make haste! your life is at stake!”

At last he came running down the stairs, and had just reached the vestibule when a pistol-shot, the signal given by the marquis, was heard.

The loud swinging open of the large gate, the rattling of the sabres of the gendarmes, the furious galloping of many horses, and a chorus of loud shouts and angry oaths, were next heard.

Leaning against the window, his brow beaded with cold perspiration, the Marquis de Clameran breathlessly awaited the issue of this expedient, upon which depended the life of his eldest son.

His measures were excellent, and deserved success.  As he had ordered, Louis and La Verdure dashed out through the gate, one to the right, the other to the left, each one pursued by a dozen mounted men.  Their horses flew like arrows, and kept far ahead of the pursuers.

Gaston would have been saved, but for the interference of fate; but was it fate, or was it malice?

Suddenly Louis’s horse stumbled, and fell to the ground with his rider.  The gendarmes rode up, and at once recognized the second son of M. de Clameran.

“This is not the assassin!” they cried.  “Let us hurry back, else he will escape!”

They returned just in time to see, by the uncertain light of the moon peeping from behind a cloud, Gaston climbing the garden wall.

“There is our man!” exclaimed the corporal.  “Keep your eyes open, and gallop after him!”

They spurred their horses, and hastened to the spot where Gaston had jumped from the wall.

On a wooded piece of ground, even if it be hilly, an agile man, if he preserves his presence of mind, can escape a number of horsemen.  The ground on this side of the park was favorable to Gaston.  He found himself in an immense madder-field; and, as is well known, as this valuable root must remain in the ground three years, the furrows are necessarily ploughed very deep.  Horses cannot even walk over its uneven surface; indeed, they can scarcely stand steadily upon it.