Several times he had been within voice of his pursuers, and once a Kanaka scout passed close to him. He had had nothing to eat, he had had no sleep, he suffered from a wound in his neck caused by the broken protruding branch of a tree; but he had courage, and he was struggling for liberty--a tolerably sweet thing when one has it not. He found the Cave at last, and with far greater ease than Carbourd had done, because he knew the ground better, and his instinct was keener. His greeting to Carbourd was nonchalantly cordial: "Well, you see, comrade, King Ovi's Cave is a reality." "So." "I saw the boat. The horses? What do you know?" "They will be at Point Assumption to-night." "Then we go to-night. We shall have to run the chances of rifles along the shore at a range something short, but we have done that before, at the Barricades, eh, Carbourd?" "At the Barricades. It is a pity that we cannot take Citizen Louise Michel with us." "Her time will come." "She has no children crying and starving at home like--" "Like yours, Carbourd, like yours. Well, I am starving here. Give me something to eat. . . . Ah, that is good--excellent! What more can we want but freedom! Till the darkness of tyranny be overpast--overpast, eh?" This speech brought another weighty matter to Carbourd's mind. He said: "I do not wish to distress you, but--" "Now, Carbourd, what is the matter? Faugh! this place smells musty. What's that--a tomb? Speak out, Citizen Carbourd." "It is this: Mademoiselle Wyndham is blind." Carbourd told the story with a great anxiety in his words. "The poor mademoiselle--is it so? A thousand pities! So kind, so young, so beautiful. Ah, I am distressed, and I finished her portrait yesterday! Yes, I remember her eyes looked too bright, and then again too dull: but I thought that it was excitement, and so--that!" Laflamme's regret was real enough up to a certain point, but, in sincerity and value, it was chasms below that of Hugh Tryon, who, even now, was getting two horses ready to give the Frenchmen their chance. After a pause Laflamme said: "She will not come here again, Carbourd? No? Ah, well, perhaps it is better so; but I should have liked to speak my thanks to her." That night Marie sat by the window of the sitting-room, with the light burning, and Angers asleep in a chair beside her--sat till long after midnight, in the thought that Laflamme, if he had reached the Cave, would, perhaps, dare something to see her and bid her good-bye. She would of course have told him not to come, but he was chivalrous, and then her blindness would touch him. Yet as the hours went by the thought came: was he, was he so chivalrous? was he altogether true? . . . He did not come. The next morning Angers took her to where the boat had been, but it was gone, and no oars were left behind. So, both had sought escape in it.