The landlord went to the stables with him, and when he returned found the highwayman standing in deep thought before the fire.
"I'm tired, friend. Is there a hole I can sleep in until daylight?"
"Of course."
"I must start at daybreak."
"What! Without a horse?"
"Yes, and without this," he said, taking off his brown mask, showing the landlord his features for the first time. "To-night 'Galloping Hermit' ceases to exist."
He kicked the dying embers into a blaze, and dropped the mask into the fire.
"That's the end of it. Show me this sleeping hole of mine," he said, taking up his parcel from the floor. "What clothes I leave in it you may have. I shall not want them any more."
With the dawn a man came out of the inn. He looked at the sky, and up the road, and down it. Under his arm he carried a fiddle and a bow. There fell from his lips a little cadence of notes, soft, low, not a laugh, nor yet a sigh, yet with something of content in it.
"For the love of a woman," he murmured, and then he went along the road northwards, his figure slowly lessening in the distance until it vanished over the brow of the hill which the morning sunlight had just touched.