“I’m suffering agonies, and I’m shivering with cold.”

“That’s right, it’ll teach you.  Tell me, where did you buy your petrol?”

“At the grocer’s.”

“At a thief’s, you mean.  It’s muck.  The plugs are getting sooted up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Can’t you hear the misfiring, you fool?”

The motor, indeed, at moments seemed to hesitate.  Then everything became normal again.  Don Luis forced the pace.  Going downhill they appeared to be hurling themselves into space.  One of the lamps went out.  The other was not as bright as usual.  But nothing diminished Don Luis’s ardour.

There was more misfiring, fresh hesitations, followed by efforts, as though the engine was pluckily striving to do its duty.  And then suddenly came the final failure, a dead stop at the side of the road, a stupid breakdown.

“Confound it!” roared Don Luis.  “We’re stuck!  Oh, this is the last straw!”

“Come, Chief, we’ll put it right.  And we’ll pick up Sauverand at Paris instead of Chartres, that’s all.”

“You infernal ass!  The repairs will take an hour!  And then she’ll break down again.  It’s not petrol, it’s filth they’ve foisted on you.”

The country stretched around them to endless distances, with no other lights than the stars that riddled the darkness of the sky.

Don Luis was stamping with fury.  He would have liked to kick the motor to pieces.  He would have liked—­

It was Mazeroux who “caught it,” in the hapless sergeant’s own words.  Don Luis took him by the shoulders, shook him, loaded him with insults and abuse and, finally, pushing him against the roadside bank and holding him there, said, in a broken voice of mingled hatred and sorrow.

“It’s she, do you hear, Mazeroux? it’s Sauverand’s companion who has done everything.  I’m telling you now, because I’m afraid of relenting.  Yes, I am a weak coward.  She has such a grave face, with the eyes of a child.  But it’s she, Mazeroux.  She lives in my house.  Remember her name:  Florence Levasseur.  You’ll arrest her, won’t you?  I might not be able to.  My courage fails me when I look at her.  The fact is that I have never loved before.

“There have been other women—­but no, those were fleeting fancies—­not even that:  I don’t even remember the past!  Whereas Florence—!  You must arrest her, Mazeroux.  You must deliver me from her eyes.  They burn into me like poison.  If you don’t deliver me I shall kill her as I killed Dolores—­or else they will kill me—­or—­Oh, I don’t know all the ideas that are driving me wild—!

“You see, there’s another man,” he explained.  “There’s Sauverand, whom she loves.  Oh, the infamous pair!  They have killed Fauville and the boy and old Langernault and those two in the barn and others besides:  Cosmo Mornington, Verot, and more still.  They are monsters, she most of all—­And if you saw her eyes-”

He spoke so low that Mazeroux could hardly hear him.  He had let go his hold of Mazeroux and seemed utterly cast down with despair, a surprising symptom in a man of his amazing vigour and authority.