‘She will tell you,’ I answered drily, my composure returning under his eye. ‘Amongst other things, that you are free. From this moment, M. de Cocheforet, I give you back your parole, and I take my own honour. Farewell.’ He cried out something as I mounted, but I did not stay to heed or answer. I dashed the spurs into my horse, and rode away past the cross-roads, past the finger-post; away with the level upland stretching before me, dry, bare, almost treeless; and behind me, all I loved. Once, when I had gone a hundred yards, I looked back and saw him standing upright against the sky, staring after me across her body. And again a minute later I looked back. This time saw only the slender wooden cross, and below it a dark blurred mass. CHAPTER XIV. ST MARTIN’S EVE It was late evening on the twenty-ninth of November when I rode into Paris through the Orleans gate. The wind was in the north-east, and a great cloud of vapour hung in the eye of an angry sunset. The air seemed to be heavy with smoke, the kennels reeked, my gorge rose at the city’s smell; and with all my heart I envied the man who had gone out of it by the same gate nearly two months before, with his face to the south and the prospect of riding day after day and league after league across heath and moor and pasture. At least he had had some weeks of life before him, and freedom and the open air, and hope and uncertainty; while I came back under doom, and in the pall of smoke that hung over the huddle of innumerable roofs saw a gloomy shadowing of my own fate. For make no mistake. A man in middle life does not strip himself of the worldly habit with which experience has clothed him, does not run counter to all the hard saws and instances by which he has governed his course so long, without shiverings and doubts and horrible misgivings, and struggles of heart. At least a dozen times between the Loire and Paris I asked myself what honour was, and what good it could do me when I lay rotting and forgotten; if I were not a fool following a Jack o’ Lanthorn; and whether, of all the men in the world, the relentless man to whom I was returning would not be the first to gibe at my folly? However, shame kept me straight; shame and the memory of Mademoiselle’s looks and words. I dared not be false to her again; I could not, after speaking so loftily, fall so low, And therefore--though not without many a secret struggle and quaking--I came, on the last evening but one of November, to the Orleans gate, and rode slowly and sadly through the streets by the Luxembourg on my way to the Pont au Change.