The third night she set out, not with indifference, since she rode by his side whose presence could never be indifferent to her, but with a heart comparatively light. If she took with her the charm which had served her so well, if it attended her to her couch and lay beneath her pillow, it was no longer the same thing to her; she smiled as she placed it there. And if her fingers closed on it in silence and darkness and she derived some comfort from it, she fell asleep with scarce a thought of the things its presence imported. For two nights she had slept little; now, worn-out, she was proof against all ordinary sounds, the rustle of a dog prowling in search of food, or the restless movements of a horse tethered near. Ay, and against other sounds as stealthy as these and more dangerous, that by-and-by crept rustling and whispering through the camp; sounds caused by a cloud of low stooping figures that moved and halted, lurked behind huts, and anon swept forward across an open space, and again lurking showed like some dark shadow of the night. A shadow fraught, when it bared its face, with horror! For what was that cry, sharp, wild, stopped in mid-utterance? Even as Bonne sprang up palpitating, and glared at the open doorway, the cry rose again--close by her; and the doorway melted into a press of dark forms that hurled themselves on her as soon as they were seen. She was borne back, choked, stifled; and desperately writhing, vainly striving to shriek, or to free mouth or hands from the folds of the coverlets that blinded her, she felt herself lifted up in a grasp against which it was vain to struggle. A moment, and with a shock that took away what breath was left in her, she was flung head and heels across something--across a horse; for the moment the thing felt her weight it moved under her. Whoever rode it held her pitilessly, cruelly heedless of the pain her position caused her. She could hardly breathe, she could not see, the movement was torture; for her arms, pinned above her head, were caught in the folds of the thing that swathed her, and she could not use them to support herself. Her one thought, her only thought was to keep her senses; her one instinct to maintain her grip on the long sharp knife which had lain under her pillow; and which had become more valuable to her than the wealth of the world. The hand that had rested on it in her sleep had tightened on it in the moment of surprise. She had it, she felt it, her fingers, even while she groaned in pain, stiffened about its haft.