“Yes,” she faltered; “I told you I felt mad, looking back at it.  But Marie is safe now; Jean has worked for her, and his relatives and friends have helped, and the minister of war.  It was the only way.  Under my own name I could never have got leave to enter the war zone while Jean was missing and suspected—­What is the matter, Mr. Bayne?” For once more I had groaned aloud.

“Simply,” I cried stormily, “that I can’t bear thinking of it!  The idea of your taking risks, of your daring the police and the Germans—­you who oughtn’t to know what the word danger means!  I tell you I can’t stand it.  Wasn’t there some man to do it for you?  Well, it’s over now; and in the future—­See here, Miss Falconer, I can’t wait any longer.  There is something I’ve got to say.”

But I was not to say it yet, for, behold! just as my tongue was loosened, I became aware of a most distinguished galaxy approaching us round the lake.  All save one of its members—­Dunny, to be exact—­were in uniform; and the personage in the lead, walking between my guardian and the duke of Raincy-la-Tour, was truly dazzling, being arrayed in a blue coat and spectacularly red trousers and wearing as a finishing touch a red cap freely braided with gold.  Miss Falconer had risen.

“Why,” she exclaimed, “it is General Le Cazeau!”

“Then confound General Le Cazeau!” was my inhospitably cry.

He was, I saw when he drew close, a person of stately dignity, as indeed the hero who had saved Merlancourt and broken that last furious, desperate, senseless onslaught of the Boches ought by rights to be.  Perhaps his splendor made me nervous.  At any rate, my conscience smote me.  I remembered with sudden panic all my manifold transgressions, beginning with the hour when I had chucked reason overboard and had deliberately concealed a murdered man’s body beneath a heap of straw.

“I believe,” I gasped, “that this is an informal court martial.  Nobody could do the things I have done and be allowed to live.  Still, I don’t see why they cured me if they were going to hang or shoot me.”

I struggled up with the help of my crutches and stood waiting my doom.

The group had paused before us, and presentations followed, throughout which the master of ceremonies was the Firefly of France.  Then the gray-headed general fixed me with a keen, stern gaze rather like an eagle’s.

“Your affair, Monsieur, has been of an irregularity,” he said.

As with kaleidoscopic swiftness the details of my “affair” passed through my memory, it was only by an effort that I restrained an indecorous shout.  He was correct.  I could call to mind no single feature that had been “regular,” from the thief who was not a thief and had flown out of my window like a conjurer, to the fight in Prezelay castle where I had vanquished four husky Germans, mostly by the aid of a wooden table, of all implements on earth.

“It is too true, Monsieur le General,” I assented promptly.  My humility seemed to soften him; he relaxed; he even approached a smile.