“This will be a hard jolt for the old chap,” I thought, “but he’ll say that I played the game.”

And Esme Falconer, my own brave, lovely Esme!  “She has come down the staircase now,” I told myself.  “She has untied Marie-Jeanne.  She has gone out and started the car.”  What would she think of my disappearance?  Well, she wouldn’t misjudge me, I felt sure; and neither would Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier.  He would know that I was acting as, in my place, he would have acted, that I didn’t mean to let Franz von Blenheim defy France and go off untouched.

The whole world seemed mysteriously to have narrowed to one girl, Esme.  How I had lived before I saw her; how, having seen her, I could ever have lived without her,—­I didn’t know.  But the sound of grinding brakes roused me.  We were slowing up in obedience to a signal from a canvas-covered, half-demolished shelter filled with men in blue uniforms; we were coming to a standstill.  Blenheim leaned out, and for a moment I saw his face in the beam of light from the sentry’s lantern.  It looked thin and set.  He was giving beneath the strain.

“Behold my comrade!” He thrust our papers into the hands of the sentry.  “And make haste, for the love of heaven!  We are waited for la-bas.”

I cast a quick glance at my body-guard, whose anxious eyes were on the sentinel.  His pistol still lay against my side, but his thoughts were far away.  It was the moment.  With the rapidity of lightning I knocked his arm up, caught his wrist, and clung to it, calling out simultaneously in a voice of crisp command.

“My friends,” I cried in French, “I order you to arrest these persons!  They are agents of the kaiser!  They are German spies!”

The pistol, clutched between us, exploded harmlessly into the air.  I head shouts, saw men running toward us.  Then I caught sight of Blenheim’s face, dark and oddly contorted; he had turned and was leveling his revolver at me, resting one knee on the driver’s seat as he took deliberate aim.

“I say,” I cried again, struggling for the weapon, “that this is Franz von Blenheim, that these are men of the kaiser, spying, in disguise—­”

It seemed to me that some one caught Blenheim’s arm from behind just as he fired; but I was not certain.  For suddenly that same whistling shriek sounded over us, nearer this time, more ominous; the earth seemed to rock and then to end in a mighty shock and cataclysm.  Blackness enveloped me, and I dropped into a bottomless pit.

CHAPTER XXV

AT RAINCY-LA-TOUR

When I opened my eyes it was with a peculiarly reluctant feeling, for my eyelids were so heavy that they seemed to weigh a ton.  My head was unspeakably groggy, and I had quite lost my memory.  I couldn’t, if suddenly interrogated, have replied with one intelligent bit of information about myself, not even with my name.