Once more I looked at the man on the chest.  He had dropped his pistol and was clasping the girl to him, soothing her, stroking her hair.  My brain began to work more rapidly.  The little flashes of light seemed to run together, to crystallize into a whole.  I knew.

Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier, the Duke of Raincy-la-Tour, the Firefly of France.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE FIREFLY OF FRANCE

He was very weak indeed; it seemed a miracle that, at the sounds below, he had found strength to drag himself from his bed and crawl inch by inch to the room of the secret panel to mount guard there; and no sooner had he soothed Miss Falconer than he collapsed in a sort of swoon.  We laid him on the chest, and I fetched a pillow for his head and stripped off my coat and spread it over him.  I took out my pocket-flask, too, and forced a few drops between his teeth.  In short I tried to play the game.

When his eyes opened, however, my endurance had reached its limits.  With a muttered excuse,—­not that I flattered myself they wanted me to stay!—­I left them and stumbled into the room of the squires, taking refuge in the grateful dark.  I don’t know how long I sat there, elbows on knees, hands propping my head; but it was a ghastly vigil.  In this round, unlike the battle in the hall, I had not been victor.  Instead, I had taken the count.

I knew now, of course, that I was in love with Esme Falconer.  Judging from the violence of the sensation, I must have loved her for quite a while.  Probably it had begun that night in the St. Ives restaurant; for when before had I watched any girl with such special, ecstatic, almost proprietary rapture?  Yes, that was why, ever since, I had been cutting such crazy capers.  From first to last they were the natural thing, the prerogative of a man in my state of mind or heart.

Many threads of the affair still remained to be unraveled.  I didn’t know what the duke was doing here, what he had been about for a month past, how the girl, far off in America, had guessed his whereabouts and his need; nor did I care.  His mere existence was enough—­that and Esme’s love for him.  All my interest in my Chinese puzzle had come to a wretched end.

“Confound him!” I thought savagely.  “We could have spared him perfectly.  What business has he turning up at the eleventh hour?  He didn’t cross the ocean with her.  He didn’t suspect her unforgivably.  He didn’t help her, and disguise himself as a chauffeur for her, and wing Schwartzmann, and bruise up the other chaps and send them rolling in a heap.  This is my adventure.  He must have had a hundred.  Why couldn’t he stick to his high-flying and dazzling and let me alone?”

The murmur of voices drifted from the lord’s bedchamber.  I could guess what they had to say to each other, Miss Falconer and her duke.  The Firefly of France!  Even I, a benighted foreigner, knew the things that title stood for:  heroism, in a land where every soldier was a hero; praise and medals and glory; thirty conquered aeroplanes—­a record over which his ancestors, those old marshals and constables lying effigied on their tombs of marble with their feet resting on carved lions, must nod their heads with pride.