lloped forward as freely
as though the race had but just begun.

Madame Alvarez stopped the carriage at one place and asked the men to
lower the hood at the back that she might feel the fresh air and see
about her, and when this had been done, the women seated themselves
with their backs to the horses where they could look out at the moonlit
road as it unrolled behind them.

Hope felt selfishly and wickedly happy. The excitement had kept her
spirits at the highest point, and the knowledge that Clay was guarding
and protecting her was in itself a pleasure. She leaned back on the
cushions and put her arm around the older woman's waist, and listened
to the light beat of his pony's hoofs outside, now running ahead, now
scrambling and slipping up some steep place, and again coming to a halt
as Langham or MacWilliams called, "Look to the right, behind those
trees," or "Ahead there! Don't you see what I mean, something
crouching?"

She did not know when the false alarms would turn into a genuine
attack, but she was confident that when the time came he would take
care of her, and she welcomed the danger because it brought that solace
with it.

Madame Alvarez sat at her side, rigid, silent, and beyond the help of
comfort. She tortured herself with thoughts of the ambitions she had
held, and which had been so cruelly mocked that very morning; of the
chivalric love that had been hers, of the life even that had been hers,
and which had been given up for her so tragically. When she spoke at
all, it was to murmur her sorrow that Hope had exposed herself to
danger on her poor account, and that her life, as far as she loved it,
was at an end. Only once after the men had parted the curtains and
asked concerning her comfort with grave solicitude did she give way to
tears.

"Why are they so good to me?" she moaned. "Why are you so good to me?
I am a wicked, vain woman, I have brought a nation to war and I have
killed the only man I ever trusted."

Hope touched her gently with her hand and felt guiltily how selfish she
herself must be not to feel the woman's grief, but she could not. She
only saw in it a contrast to her own happiness, a black background
before which the figure of Clay and his solicitude for her shone out,
the only fact in the world that was of value.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the carriage coming to a halt, and a
significant movement upon the part of the men. MacWilliams had
descended from the box