de Cocheforet, I give you back your parole, and I
take my own honour. Farewell.'
He cried out something as I mounted, but I did not stay to heed
or answer. I dashed the spurs into my horse, and rode away past
the cross-roads, past the finger-post; away with the level upland
stretching before me, dry, bare, almost treeless; and behind me,
all I loved. Once, when I had gone a hundred yards, I looked
back and saw him standing upright against the sky, staring after
me across her body. And again a minute later I looked back.
This time saw only the slender wooden cross, and below it a dark
blurred mass.
CHAPTER XIV
ST MARTIN'S EVE
It was late evening on the twenty-ninth of November when I rode
into Paris through the Orleans gate. The wind was in the north-
east, and a great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry
sunset. The air seemed to be heavy with smoke, the kennels
reeked, my gorge rose at the city's smell; and with all my heart
I envied the man who had gone out of it by the same gate nearly
two months before, with his face to the south and the prospect of
riding day after day and league after league across heath and
moor and pasture.
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