It is dark, and he feels a pang of self-reproach at the thought of Eleanor.
Yet his heart is light, and he whistles as he turns his horse's head homewards.
He loses himself in thought, for Carol Quinton is an imaginative man. As far as his fancy is concerned, he is artist, author, poet, and actor. He creates pictures in his brain, dreams of immortal verse, invents a thousand thrilling anecdotes, and quaint love histories. His train of ideas is more that of a woman than a man.
The moon rises, and he watches it floating above him
Like one that had been led astray,
Through the heaven's wide pathless way.
But the soul of the poet, soaring in the high region of his fancies, is suddenly rudely shaken. His horse starts, throws up its head and snorts, then shies across the road, as a dark shadow blackens the white stretch of moonlit ground.
"Steady," murmurs Quinton, patting the animal's neck, which is damp with sudden terror.
A black figure comes out from the gloom as he speaks—a tall, masked man on horseback—and before Quinton realises his presence he is seized violently by the throat and dragged from his saddle. A hissing sound as of suppressed rage issues from the assassin's lips—he towers above Quinton, and is muscular and active. Carol is taken unawares, and therefore at a disadvantage. He is like a rat in the paws of a tiger, he can neither cry out nor speak, for the cruel fingers press with deadly force upon his windpipe, and he is flung backwards and forwards, shaken till his teeth rattle in his head and his eyes all but drop from their sockets.
