"Perhaps."
"It is not far. The horse is very quiet. He will amble along if you give him his head."
"But you?"
"I'd like to rest. I'll find shelter in a cottage perhaps . . . or in the wood."
St. Genis said nothing more for the moment. He was intent on sliding down from the saddle without too much assistance from Bobby. When he had reached the ground, it took him a little while to collect himself, for his head was swimming: he closed his eyes and put out a hand to steady himself against a tree.
When Maurice opened his eyes again, Bobby was sitting on the ground by the roadside: the horse was nibbling a clump of fresh, green grass.
For the first time since that awful moment when stumbling and falling against a pile of dead, with Death behind and all around him, he had heard the welcome call: "Can you pull yourself up?" and felt the steadying grip upon his elbow—Maurice de St. Genis looked upon the man to whom he owed his life.
With that stained bandage round his head, dulled and bloodshot eyes, face blackened with powder and smoke and features drawn and haggard, Bobby Clyffurde was indeed almost unrecognisable. But Maurice knew him on the instant. Hitherto, he had not thought of how he had come out of that terrible hell-fire behind La Haye Sainte—indeed, he had quickly lost consciousness and never regained it till now: and now he knew that the same man who in the narrow hotel room near Lyons had ungrudgingly rendered him a signal service—had risked his life to-day for his—Maurice's sake.
No one could have entered that awful mêlée and faced the bayonet charge of Pelet's cuirassiers and the hail of bullets from their tirailleurs without taking imminent risk of death. Yet Clyffurde had done it. Why? Maurice—wide-eyed and sullen—could only find one answer to that insistent question.
That same deadly pang of jealousy which had assailed his heart after the midnight interview at the inn now held him in its cruel grip again. He felt that he hated the man to whom he owed his life, and that he hated himself for this mean and base ingratitude. He would not trust himself to speak or to look on Bobby at all, lest the ugly thoughts which were floating through his mind set their stamp upon his face.