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Denise stood there watching these dots of fire, afraid yet not afraid, striving to understand what was happening down there in the darkness. The shouting died down suddenly, to change into the scattered cries of men running to and fro. The torches tossed this way and that as though Gaillard’s fellows were hunting for fugitives, calling to one another as they doubled upon their tracks. One of the torches came some little distance up the hill towards the beech wood and then halted, and remained motionless, flaming like the eye of a cyclops.

Denise had drawn back behind the tree, when she heard the sound of something moving in the darkness. A black shape passed momentarily between her and the torch burning below upon the hillside. Footsteps came near to her, the stumbling, irregular, running steps of a man hard put for breath, and perhaps—for blood. He passed close to her in the darkness, labouring for breath, and staggering from side to side. She could still see the moving shadow in the gloom, when it plunged like a man falling forward over a cliff, and she heard the sound of a body striking the crisp, dead leaves. Fear was beneath Denise’s feet for the moment. The man had fallen over the straggling root of a tree, and he was struggling to rise as Denise came up with him.