“I know I shall not forget yours,” said the other, and extended once more his ungainly arms in an unnatural gesture.  Then of a sudden there came out of him a spout of wild and yet pompous phrases.  “It is as well that you should know the worst and the best.  I am a man who knows no limit; I am the most callous of criminals, the most unrepentant of sinners.  There is no man in my dominions so vile as I. But my dominions stretch from the olives of Italy to the fir-woods of Denmark, and there is no nook of all of them in which I have not done a sin.  But when I bear you away I shall be doing my first sacrilege, and also my first act of virtue.”  He seized her suddenly by the elbow; and she did not scream but only pulled and tugged.  Yet though she had not screamed, someone astray in the woods seemed to have heard the struggle.  A short but nimble figure came along the woodland path like a humming bullet and had caught Count Gregory a crack across the face before his own could be recognized.  When it was recognized it was that of Camille, with the black elderly beard and the young ardent eyes.

Up to the moment when Camille had hit the Count, Madeleine had entertained no doubt that the Count was merely a madman.  Now she was startled with a new sanity; for the tall man in the yellow whiskers and yellow moustache first returned the blow of Bert, as if it were a sort of duty, and then stepped back with a slight bow and an easy smile.

“This need go no further here, M. Bert,” he said.  “I need not remind you how far it should go elsewhere.”

“Certainly, you need remind me of nothing,” answered Camille, stolidly.  “I am glad that you are just not too much of a scoundrel for a gentleman to fight.”

“We are detaining the lady,” said Count Gregory, with politeness; and, making a gesture suggesting that he would have taken off his hat if he had had one, he strode away up the avenue of trees and eventually disappeared.  He was so complete an aristocrat that he could offer his back to them all the way up that avenue; and his back never once looked uncomfortable.

“You must allow me to see you home,” said Bert to the girl, in a gruff and almost stifled voice; “I think we have only a little way to go.”

“Only a little way,” she said, and smiled once more that night, in spite of fatigue and fear and the world and the flesh and the devil.  The glowing and transparent blue of twilight had long been covered by the opaque and slatelike blue of night, when he handed her into the lamp-lit interior of her home.  He went out himself into the darkness, walking sturdily, but tearing at his black beard.