The hand of fate seemed on me now, and reining round my horse, I found myself almost face to face with the leader of the Cossacks; and all that passed after this occurred in shorter time than I can take to write it. Uttering an exulting cry, he raised himself in his stirrups, and savagely launched at me with all his force the Cossack spear. I eluded it by swerving my body round; but it pierced deeply the off flank of my poor horse, and hung dangling there, with the crimson blood pouring from the wound and smoking upward from the snow. The animal was plunging wildly and madly now, yet I fired the five remaining pistol shots full at the Russian ere he could draw his sword; and one at least must have taken effect somewhere, for he fell almost beneath my horse's hoofs, and as he did so his cap flew off, and I recognised Volhonski--whom, by a singular coincidence, I thus again encountered--Count Volhonski, the Colonel of the Vladimir Infantry! At the same moment I was fiercely charged by the five advanced Cossacks, with their levelled lances, and with my horse was literally hurled over the cliffs into the sea, the waves of which I heard bellowing below me. Within the pace of one pulsation--one respiration--as we fell whizzing through the air for some sixty feet together, I seemed to live all my past life over again; but I have no language wherewith to express the mingled bitterness and desolation that came over my soul at that time. Estelle lost to me; life, too, it seemed, going, for I must be drowned or taken--taken but to die. The remembrance of all I had loved and of all who loved me; all that I had delighted in--the regiment, which was my pride--my friends and comrades, and all that had ever raised hope or fancy, or excited emulation--seemed lost to me, as the waves of the Black Sea closed over my head, and I went down to die, my fate unknown, and even in my grave, "unhousled, disappointed, unaneled." Even now as I write, when the danger has long since passed away, and when the sun has shone again in all his glory on me, in my dreams I am sometimes once more the desperate and despairing fellow I was then. CHAPTER XLIII.--WINIFRED'S SECRET.