"I will," I said briskly, "with the greatest pleasure. And you will be able to tell them who I am." "I?" he answered. "No, indeed. I do not know. I only know who you told me you were." I fell to earth again, and for a moment stood staring through the darkness at him. A moment only. For then out of the darkness came a voice. "Have no fear, M. le Vicomte, I will speak for you." I started and stared. "_Mon Dieu!_" I said, trembling. "Who spoke?" "It is I--Buton," came the answer. "I have your horse, M. le Vicomte." It was Buton, the blacksmith; Captain Buton, of the Committee. * * * * * This for the time cut the thread of my difficulties. When we rode into the village ten minutes later, the Committee, awed by the credentials which Buton carried, accepted his explanation at once, and raised no further objection to my journey. So twelve hours afterwards we three, thus strangely thrown together, passed through Suméne. We slept at Sauve, and presently leaving behind us the late winter of the mountains, with its frost and snow, began to descend in sunshine the western slope of the Rhone valley. All day we rode through balmy air, between fields and gardens and olive groves; the white dust, the white houses, the white cliffs eloquent of the south. And a little before sunset we came in sight of Nîmes, and hailed the end of a journey that, for me, had not been without its adventures. CHAPTER XIX. AT NÎMES. It will be believed that I looked on the city with no common emotions. I had heard enough at Villeraugues--and to that enough M. de Géol had added by the way a thousand details--to satisfy me that here and not in the north, here in the Gard, and the Bouches du Rhone, among the olive groves and white dust of the south, and not among the wheatfields and pastures of the north, the fate of the nation hung in the balance; and that not in Paris--where men would and yet would not, where Mirabeau and Lafayette, in fear of the mob, took one day a step towards the King, and the next, fearful lest restored he should punish, retraced it--could the convulsion be arrested, but here! Here, where the warm imagination of the Provençal still saw something holy in things once holy, and faction bound men to faith.