As I stood listening to the breathing of the horses, the excitement in which I had passed the last few hours died away, and left me wondering--wondering, and a little regretful. The exaltation gone, I found the scene I had just left flavourless; I even presently began to find it worse. Some false note in the cynical, boastful voices and the selfish--the utterly selfish--plans, to which I had been listening for hours, made itself heard in the stillness. Madame's "We are France," which had sounded well amid the lights and glitter of the _salon_, among laces and _fripons_ and rose-pink coats, seemed folly in the face of the infinite night, behind which lay twenty-five millions of Frenchmen. However, what I had done, I had done. I had the white cockade on my breast; I was pledged to order--and to my order. And it might be the better course. But, with reflection, enthusiasm faded; and, by some strange process, as it faded, and the scene in which I had just taken part lost its hold, the errand that had brought me to Cahors recovered importance. As Madame St. Alais' influence grew weak, the memory of Mademoiselle, sitting lonely and scared in her coach, grew vivid, until I turned my horse fretfully, and endeavoured to lose the thought in rapid movement. But it is not so easy to escape from oneself at night, as in the day. The soughing of the wind through the chestnut trees, the drifting clouds, and the sharp ring of hoofs on the road, all laid as it were a solemn finger on the pulses and stilled them. The men behind me talked in sleepy voices, or rode silently. The town lay a hundred leagues behind. Not a light appeared on the upland. In the world of night through which we rode, a world of black, mysterious bulks rising suddenly against the grey sky, and as suddenly sinking, we were the only inhabitants. At last we reached the hill above St. Alais, and I looked eagerly for lights in the valley; forgetting that, as it wanted only an hour of midnight, the village would have retired hours before. The disappointment, and the delay--for the steepness of the hill forbade any but a walking pace--fretted me; and when I heard, a moment later, a certain noise behind me, a noise I knew only too well, I flared up. "Stay, fool!" I cried, reining in my horse, and turning in the saddle. "That mare has broken her shoe again, and you are riding on as if nothing were the matter! Get down--and see. Do you think that I----" "Pardon, Monsieur," Gil muttered. He had been sleeping in his saddle. He scrambled down. The mare he rode, a valuable one, had a knack of breaking her hind shoe; after which she never failed to lame herself at the first opportunity. Buton had tried every method of shoeing, but without success. I sprang to the ground while he lifted the foot. My ear had not deceived me; the shoe was broken. Gil tried to remove the jagged fragment left on the hoof, but the mare was restive, and he had to desist.