“Faster!” cried Don Luis.  “We’re making no headway.  Go faster, can’t you?”

Florence murdered!  Perhaps the crime was not yet accomplished.  No, it could not be!  Killing takes time.  It is preceded by words, by the offer of a bargain, by threats, by entreaties, by a wholly unspeakable scene.  But the thing was being prepared, Florence was going to die!

Florence was going to die by the hand of the brute who loved her.  For he loved her:  Don Luis had an intuition of that monstrous love; and he was bound to believe that such a love could only end in torture and bloodshed.

Sable ...  Sille-le-Guillaume....

The earth sped beneath them.  The trees and houses glided by like shadows.

And then Alencon.

It was hardly more than a quarter to two when they landed in a meadow between the town and Damigni.  Don Luis made inquiries.  A number of motor cars had passed along the road to Damigni, including a small limousine driven by a gentleman who had turned down a crossroad.  And this crossroad led to the woods at the back of Langernault’s estate, the Old Castle.

Don Luis’s conviction was so firm that, after taking leave of Davanne, he helped him to start on his homeward flight.  He had no further need of him.  He needed nobody.  The final duel was at hand.

He ran along, guided by the tracks of the tires in the dust, and followed the crossroad.  To his great surprise this road went nowhere near the wall behind the barn from which he had jumped a few weeks before.  After clearing the woods, Don Luis came out into a large untilled space where the road turned back toward the estate and ended at an old two-winged gate protected with iron sheets and bars.

The limousine had gone in that way.

“And I must get in this way, too,” thought Don Luis.  “I must get in at all costs and immediately, without wasting time in looking for an opening or a handy tree.”

Now the wall was thirteen feet high at this spot.  Don Luis got in.  How he managed it, by what superhuman effort, he himself could not have said after he had done it.

Somehow or other, by hanging on to invisible projections, by digging a knife which he had borrowed from Davanne into the interstices between the stones, he managed it.

And when he was on the other side he discovered the tracks of the tires running to the left, toward a part of the grounds which he did not know, more undulating than the other and broken up with little hills and ruined buildings covered with thick curtains of ivy.

Deserted though the rest of the park was, this portion seemed much more uncivilized, in spite of the ragged remains of box and laurel hedges that stood here and there amidst the nettles and brambles, and the luxuriant swarm of tall wild-flowers, valerian, mullein, hemlock, foxglove, and angelica.