Sure enough there was my errand!  As a private person I was neither French nor English; I was something else first:  a loyal gentleman, an honest man.  Sim and Candlish must not be left to pay the penalty of my unfortunate blow.  They held my honour tacitly pledged to succour them; and it is a sort of stoical refinement entirely foreign to my nature to set the political obligation above the personal and private.  If France fell in the interval for the lack of Anne de St.-Yves, fall she must!  But I was both surprised and humiliated to have had so plain a duty bound upon me for so long—­and for so long to have neglected and forgotten it.  I think any brave man will understand me when I say that I went to bed and to sleep with a conscience very much relieved, and woke again in the morning with a light heart.  The very danger of the enterprise reassured me:  to save Sim and Candlish (suppose the worst to come to the worst) it would be necessary for me to declare myself in a court of justice, with consequences which I did not dare to dwell upon; it could never be said that I had chosen the cheap and the easy—­only that in a very perplexing competition of duties I had risked my life for the most immediate.

We resumed the journey with more diligence:  thenceforward posted day and night; did not halt beyond what was necessary for meals; and the postillions were excited by gratuities, after the habit of my cousin Alain.  For twopence I could have gone farther and taken four horses; so extreme was my haste, running as I was before the terrors of an awakened conscience.  But I feared to be conspicuous.  Even as it was, we attracted only too much attention, with our pair and that white elephant, the seventy-pounds-worth of claret-coloured chaise.

Meanwhile I was ashamed to look Rowley in the face.  The young shaver had contrived to put me wholly in the wrong; he had cost me a night’s rest and a severe and healthful humiliation; and I was grateful and embarrassed in his society.  This would never do; it was contrary to all my ideas of discipline; if the officer has to blush before the private, or the master before the servant, nothing is left to hope for but discharge or death.  I hit upon the idea of teaching him French; and accordingly, from Lichfield, I became the distracted master, and he the scholar—­how shall I say? indefatigable, but uninspired.  His interest never flagged.  He would hear the same word twenty times with profound refreshment, mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it again with magical celerity.  Say it happened to be stirrup.  ’No, I don’t seem to remember that word, Mr. Anne,’ he would say:  ’it don’t seem to stick to me, that word don’t.’  And then, when I had told it him again, ‘Etrier!’ he would cry.  ’To be sure!  I had it on the tip of my tongue.  Eterier!’ (going wrong already, as if by a fatal instinct).  ’What will I remember it by, now?  Why, interior, to be sure!  I’ll remember