He stopped here a little while in the lee of a great oak to protect himself from the driving rain, and he noticed then that it was but a passing shower, sent, it seemed then to him, as a providential aid.  The part of the rumble that was real thunder was dying.  The yellow flare of the lightning stopped and the rain swept off to the east.  The moon and stars were coming out again.

John tried to see the chateau, but it was hidden from him by trees.  They would miss him there, and then they would know that it was he whom the soldiers had fired upon at the edge of the pond.  All of them would believe that he was dead, and he remembered suddenly that Julie, who was there among them, would believe it, too.  Would she grieve?  Or would he merely be one of the human beings passing through her life, fleeting and forgotten, like the shower that had just gone?  It was true that he had escaped, but he might be killed in some battle before she was rescued from Auersperg—­if she was rescued.

These thoughts were hateful, and turning into the road by which they had come to the chateau he ran down it.  He ran because he wanted motion, because he wished to reach the French army as quickly as he could, and help Lannes organize for the rescue of Julie.

He ran a long distance, because his excitement waned slowly, and because the severe exercise made the blood course rapidly through his veins, counteracting the effects of his cold and wetting.  When he began to feel weary he turned out of the road, knowing that it was safer in the fields.  He had the curious belief or impression now that the black shower was all arranged for his benefit.  Providence was merely making things even.  The soldiers had been brought upon him when the chances were a hundred to one against him, and then the shower had been sent to cover him, when the chances were a hundred to one against that, too.

He saw far to the south a sudden faint radiance and he knew that it was the last of the lightning.  The little feathery clouds, which looked so friendly and pleasant against the blue of the sky, came back and the moaning on the western horizon toward which he was traveling was wholly that of the guns.

He heard a noise over his head, a mixture of a whistle and a scream, and he knew that a shell was passing high.  He walked on, and heard another.  But they could not be firing at him.  He was still that mere mote in the infinite darkness, but, looking back for the bursting of the shells, he saw a blaze leap up near the point from which he had come.

A cold shiver seized him.  The range was that of the chateau, and Julie was there.  The French gunners could have no knowledge that their own people were prisoners in the building, and if one of those huge shells burst in it, ruin and destruction would follow.  The conservatory had been a silent witness of what flying metal could do.  He stopped, appalled.  He had been wrong to leave without Julie, and yet he could have done nothing else.  It was impossible to foresee a shelling of the chateau by the French themselves.