The Marquis laughed to applaud his friend's philosophy, and his glance approved him fawningly.
The young soldier considered them.
'Sirs, I will resume my search.'
When they had searched until night closed in upon the world, investigating every hedge and bush that might afford concealment, the captain came to think that either he had been at fault in concluding that the fugitive had sought shelter in the garden, or else the rogue had found some way out and was now beyond their reach.
He retired crestfallen, and the three gentlemen who had accompanied his search and who did not conceal their amusement at its failure went in to supper.
CHAPTER V
THE PRINCESS
At about the time that the young Lord of Montferrat was sitting down belatedly to table with his tutor and his gentleman-in-waiting, a very bedraggled and chilled Bellarion, who for two hours had been standing immersed to the chin in water, his head amid the branches of the alder-bush, came cautiously forth at last. He ventured no farther, however, than the shallow tongue of land behind the marble pavilion, ready at the first alarm to plunge back into his watery concealment.
There he lay, shivering in the warm night, and taking stock of his plight, an exercise which considerably diminished him in his self-confidence and self-esteem.
'Experience,' he had been wont to say—being rather addicted, I gather, to the making of epigrammatic formulæ—'is the hornbook of fools, unnecessary for the practical purposes of life to the man of wit.'