"But the last we heard was of a victory won by him on the sixteenth!" cried the young officer. His friend had suddenly raised himself from his recumbent position. But for all their questions Mercury could tell them no more, and presently departed, as he came, by sea, himself only half believing that his information was correct, and not knowing that what he had just carried was the news of Waterloo.
"This may be true, or it may not," opined Laurent at length; "at any rate, I am going to have a swim on the strength of it. Take care of my clothes for me!"
He stripped them off hastily, ran down the beach, and plunged in. Aymar looked after him with a smile. When the swimmer came back, laughing and dripping, L'Oiseleur said thoughtfully, "There must be something in this news. If it is true, perhaps we need not stay here long."
"Yes," agreed Laurent, rubbing his face with his handkerchief, "but we can't move till we know something more definite. Meanwhile"—he hurried into his clothes—"let us go and eat. I am hungry. We will even drink to the news in the stuff Royer has brought."
Aymar's arm was over his shoulder as they went towards the cave. At the entrance he suddenly removed it, and said in a rather unsteady voice, ". . . I find it so hard to believe. . . . Oh, mon ami, are you merely trying to comfort me when you say you hold me justified, when you say you would have done the same in my place? Is it true, Laurent, or is it only your good heart?"
And, his face as pale as ivory against the darkness within, he looked at him with eyes that pierced and supplicated at the same time. Laurent threw down the net of provisions and seized his available hand in both his own.
"Aymar, on my honour as a gentleman! Have I not said so enough? You have brooded over this thing till you are morbid about it. I don't wonder. But, given what went before, the almost completed plan on the one hand and a woman's life at stake on the other, I should have done the same. So would any man. If you will not believe me, what am I to do? Call you out for it?"
Aymar freed his hand and put it on his shoulder. "Did I not say that no man ever had a friend like you?"
"But it isn't friendship, it's common sense!" retorted Laurent stoutly. ". . . Oh, saints and angels, I have broken the bottle of wine!"