The surging sounded louder.  It seemed to be in his brain.  It bewildered him, deprived him of the power to think.  A great many voices seemed to clamour around him, but only one could be clearly heard; only one, and that the voice of a child close to him—­or was that also an illusion born of the racking strain that had driven all the blood to his head?

“You won’t fail me, will you?” it said.

Surely his grasp was slackening, his powers were passing, when like a flashlight those words illuminated his brain.  He was as one in deep waters, swamped and sinking; but that voice called him back.

He opened his eyes, he drew a great breath.  He flung his whole soul into one last great effort.  He remembered suddenly that the little English girl, the child with the glorious hair and laughing eyes, his acquaintance of an hour, would be looking for him exactly two weeks from that moment.  He was sure she would look, and—­she would be disappointed if she looked in vain.  One must not disappoint a child.

The memory of her went through him, vivid, enchanting, compelling.  It nerved his sinking heart.  It renewed his grip on life.  It urged him upwards.

Only a child!  Only a child!  But yet—­

“I shall not—­shall not—­fail you!” he gasped, and with the words his knees reached the top of the cliff.

His strength collapsed instantly, like the snapping of a fiddle-string.  He fell forward on his face, and lay prone...

A little later he worked the whole of his body into security, rolled over on his back with closed eyes to the sky, and waited while his heart slowed down to its normal rhythmic beat.

At last, quite suddenly, he sat up and looked around him.  The laughter flashed back into his eyes.  He sprang to his feet, mud-stained, dishevelled, yet exultant.

He clicked his heels together and faced the sinking sun, slim and upright, one stiff hand to his head.  He had diced with the gods, and he had won.

“Destinee!  Je te salue!” he said, and the next instant whizzed smartly round with a soldier’s precision of movement and marched away towards the fortress that crowned the hill above the rocks of Valpre.

CHAPTER III

A ROPE OF SAND

Undoubtedly Mademoiselle Gautier was querulous, and equally without doubt she had good reason to be so; but it made it a little dull for Chris. Accidents would happen, wherever one went, and what was the good of making a fuss?

Of course, every allowance had to be made for poor Mademoiselle in consideration of the fact that she was torn in pieces by the valiant attempt to keep her attention focussed upon three children at once.  The effort had not so far been a brilliant success, and Mademoiselle, conscious within herself of her inability to cope adequately with her threefold responsibility, being moreover worn out by her gallant struggle to do so, was inclined to shortness of temper and a severity of judgment that bordered upon injustice.