He opened his eyes, he drew a great breath. He flung his whole soul into one last great effort. He remembered suddenly that the little English girl, the child with the glorious hair and laughing eyes, his acquaintance of an hour, would be looking for him exactly two weeks from that moment. He was sure she would look, and—she would be disappointed if she looked in vain. One must not disappoint a child.
The memory of her went through him, vivid, enchanting, compelling. It nerved his sinking heart. It renewed his grip on life. It urged him upwards.
Only a child! Only a child! But yet—
"I shall not—shall not—fail you!" he gasped, and with the words his knees reached the top of the cliff.
His strength collapsed instantly, like the snapping of a fiddle-string.
He fell forward on his face, and lay prone…
A little later he worked the whole of his body into security, rolled over on his back with closed eyes to the sky, and waited while his heart slowed down to its normal rhythmic beat.
At last, quite suddenly, he sat up and looked around him. The laughter flashed back into his eyes. He sprang to his feet, mud-stained, dishevelled, yet exultant.
He clicked his heels together and faced the sinking sun, slim and upright, one stiff hand to his head. He had diced with the gods, and he had won.
"Destinée! Je te salue!" he said, and the next instant whizzed smartly round with a soldier's precision of movement and marched away towards the fortress that crowned the hill above the rocks of Valpré.