“Truss him up, lads,” said the heavy voice.  “Clear the way in front of the coach.  There sit those whom we avenge upon a presumptuous lackey.  Now, Whiffen, you have a fair audience, lay on and baste him.”

Two men began to drag M. Beaucaire toward a great oak by the roadside.  Another took from his saddle a heavy whip with three thongs.

“A moi, Francois!”

There was borne on the breeze an answer—­“Monseigneur!  Monseigneur!” The cry grew louder suddenly.  The clatter of hoofs urged to an anguish of speed sounded on the night.  M. Beaucaire’s servants had lagged sorely behind, but they made up for it now.  Almost before the noise of their own steeds they came riding down the moonlit aisle between the mists.  Chosen men, these servants of Beaucaire, and like a thunderbolt they fell upon the astounded cavaliers.

“Chateaurien!  Chateaurien!” they shouted, and smote so swiftly that, through lack of time, they showed no proper judgment, discriminating nothing between non-combatants and their master’s foes.  They charged first into the group about M. Beaucaire, and broke and routed it utterly.  Two of them leaped to the young man’s side, while the other four, swerving, scarce losing the momentum of their onset, bore on upon the gentlemen near the coach, who went down beneath the fierceness of the onslaught, cursing manfully.

“Our just deserts,” said Mr. Molyneux, his mouth full of dust and philosophy.

Sir Hugh Guilford’s horse fell with him, being literally ridden over, and the baronet’s leg was pinned under the saddle.  In less than ten minutes from the first attack on M. Beaucaire, the attacking party had fled in disorder, and the patrician non-combatants, choking with expletives, consumed with wrath, were prisoners, disarmed by the Frenchman’s lackeys.

Guilford’s discomfiture had freed the doors of the coach; so it was that when M. Beaucaire, struggling to rise, assisted by his servants, threw out one hand to balance himself, he found it seized between two small, cold palms, and he looked into two warm, dilating eyes, that were doubly beautiful because of the fright and rage that found room in them, too.

M. le Duc Chateaurien sprang to his feet without the aid of his lackeys, and bowed low before Lady Mary.

“I make ten thousan’ apology to be’ the cause of a such melee in your presence,” he said; and then, turning to Francois, he spoke in French:  “Ah, thou scoundrel!  A little, and it had been too late.”

Francois knelt in the dust before him.  “Pardon!” he said.  “Monseigneur commanded us to follow far in the rear, to remain unobserved.  The wind malignantly blew against monseigneur’s voice.”

“See what it might have cost, my children,” said his master, pointing to the ropes with which they would have bound him and to the whip lying beside them.  A shudder passed over the lackey’s frame; the utter horror in his face echoed in the eyes of his fellows.