It was in that hour, while the night lingered and the stars still shone and the cannon of the two armies challenged each other steadily, that the Firefly of France fought his greatest battle in the air.  Since his whole aim was escape, it was bloodless; he had to trust to skill and cunning; he dared manoeuvers that appalled others, dropped plummet-like, looped dizzily, soared to the sheerest heights.  He had been wounded.  The framework of his plane was damaged.  Still he gained on his foes and won through to the lines of France.

“But I might not land there,” he explained.  “The Germans followed.  A mist had closed about us, hiding us from my friends below.  I heard only my propeller; and that, by now, sounded faint to me, for I was weakening; one shot had hit my shoulder and another had wounded my left arm.”

The girl swayed closer against him, watching him with eyes of worship.  Well, I didn’t wonder, though it cut me to the heart.  Even a fairy prince could have been no worthier of her than this Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier; of that at least, I told myself dourly, I must be glad.

“As I raced on,” said the duke, “there came a certain thought to me.  We had traveled far; we were in the country near Prezelay, my cousin’s house.  The village, I knew, was ruined, but the chateau stood; and if I could reach it, old Marie-Jeanne would help me.  You comprehend, my weakness was growing.  I knew I had little more time.”

The shrouding mist had aided him to lose those pursuing vultures.  The last of them fell off, baffled,—­or afraid to go deeper into France.  Now he emerged again into the clear air and the starlight.  The land beneath him was a scudding blur, with a dark-green mass in its center, the forest of La Fay.

And then, suddenly, he knew he must land if he were not to lose consciousness and hurtle down blindly; and with set teeth and sweat beading his forehead, he began the descent.  At the end his strength failed him.  The plane crashed among the trees.  “But Saint Denis, who helps all Frenchmen, helped me,”—­he smiled—­“and I was thrown clear.”

From that thicket where his machine lay hidden it was a mile to Prezelay.  He dragged himself over this distance, sometimes on his hands and knees.  Soon after dawn Marie-Jeanne, answering a discordant ringing, found a man lying outside the gate and babbling deliriously, her master’s cousin, in a blood-soaked uniform, holding out a bundle of papers, and begging her by the soul of her mother to put them in the castle’s secret hiding-place.

She did it.  Then she coaxed the wounded man to the rooms opening from the gallery and tended him day and night through the weeks of fever that ensued.  From his ravings she learned that he was in danger and feared pursuers; and with the peasant’s instinct for caution, she had not dared to send for help.

“It was yesterday,” the duke told us, “that my mind came back.  I knew then what must be thought of me, what must be said of me, all over France.”  He was leaning on the wall now, exhausted and white, but dauntless.  “No matter for that—­I have the papers.  You recall the hiding-place?”