He came to--how much later he had small idea--with sand in his mouth and an almost intolerable aching in his fractured elbow. Whether the soldiers had searched for him or no he could not tell. He hardly realised that, except from the beach itself, he was invisible where he lay. But he did not conceive that there was any permanent shelter for him on Quiberon. Looking stupidly at his arm, he saw that the bleeding had stopped, but the arm was much worse than useless, for it was anguish to move it in any direction. . . . Really the simplest plan was to stay where he was. The soldiers would find him in time, and could finish their work; on the whole, it was foolishness not to have stayed up there by the wall to let them do it. . . . And Fortuné lay down again, with relief, on the fine and kindly sand that had already drunk his blood and now offered him oblivion. For though he had said to himself a little while ago that if he had a chance he would take it, and though he had leapt the wall instinctively, and had run as never before in his life, yet now, after all, his will faltered. For one thing, he was sick with pain; for another, he was badly crippled. And what inducements had he, he asked himself, to wrestle further with destiny?--for a fight it would be, and most probably a losing one. Anne-Hilarion, to whom he now owed a duty; his mother, whom he loved; the cause he followed? Yes; but to none of these was he indispensable. That dark star of his, which for ten years had represented love to him, certainly offered him no light to live by; nor did revenge, since St. Four was dead. All he asked for was to yield, to contend no more. But in a few moments he had struggled up again on to his elbow. The naturally unsubmissive bent of his mind worked automatically against such a surrender, and the remembrance of his promise to René came back even stronger than it had done last night. He had pledged himself to do his best to escape; René's last words to him--possibly the last he had ever spoken--had been on that matter. But how was he to fulfil that promise? Leaning thus on his right elbow, La Vireville studied the sand, that strangely white sand of Quiberon. How _could_ he save himself--it was practically impossible now! Under his gaze, covered with half-dried blood from the shattered arm which it had supported in his flight, lay his right hand, and that was all he had to depend on. Slowly and awkwardly enough (and even then at the cost of what made him set his teeth) he raised himself a little higher. And as he propped himself on this sound but bloodstained hand, he was suddenly aware of a minor pang in that. Glancing down again he saw that in changing his position he had brushed it against a plant of sea-holly, of which there were many on the shore and the dunes of Quiberon.