For a long space they had no sense but that of rapid, ceaseless motion through the thick gloom and against the pressure of the violent blasts.  The speed of their gallop and the strength of the currents of air were like some narcotic that drowned and that dizzied perception.  In the intense darkness neither could see, neither hear, the other; the instinct of the beasts kept them together, but no word could be heard above the roar of the storm, and no light broke the somber veil of shadow through which they passed as fast as leopards course through the night.  The first faint streak of dawn grew gray in the east when Cecil felt his charger stagger and sway beneath him, and halt, worn out and quivering in every sinew with fatigue.  He threw himself off the animal in time to save himself from falling with it as it reeled and sank to the ground.

“Massena cannot stir another yard,” he said.  “Do you think they follow us still?”

There was no reply.

He strained his sight to pierce the darkness, but he could distinguish nothing; the gloom was still too deep.  He spoke more loudly; still there was no reply.  Then he raised his voice in a shout; it rang through the silence, and, when it ceased, the silence reigned again.

A deadly chill came on him.  How had he missed his comrade?  They must be far apart, he knew, since no response was given to his summons; or—­the alternative rose before him with a terrible foreboding.

That intense quiet had a repose as of death in it, a ghastly loneliness that seemed filled with desolation.  His horse was stretched before him on the sand, powerless to rise and drag itself a rood onward, and fast expiring.  From the plains around him not a sound came, either of friend or foe.  The consciousness that he was alone, that he had lost forever the only friend left to him, struck on him with that conviction which so often foreruns the assurance of calamity.  Without a moment’s pause he plunged back in the direction he had come, leaving the charger on the ground to pant its life out as it must, and sought to feel his way along, so as to seek as best he could the companion he had deserted.  He still could not see a rood before him, but he went on slowly, with some vague hope that he should ere long reach the man whom he knew death or the fatality of accident alone would keep from his side.  He could not feel or hear anything that gave him the slightest sign or clew to aid his search; he only wandered farther from his horse, and risked falling afresh into the hands of his pursuers; he shouted again with all his strength, but his own voice alone echoed over the plains, while his heart stood still with the same frozen dread that a man feels when, wrecked on some barren shore, his cry for rescue rings back on his own ear over the waste of waters.