about the wretch. He pressed on, and reached the plateau above the
quarry. The clearing was now flooded with moonlight, and the doorway of
the hut was plainly visible. Jan Maertz was not at his post, but this
was not surprising, as he would surely have joined old Joos and the
terrified women at the first sounds of the firing.

"Liege!" said Dalroy, speaking loudly enough for any one in the hut to
hear. There was no answer. "Liege!" he cried again, with a certain
foreboding that things had gone awry, and dreading lest the precious
respite he had secured might be wasted irretrievably.

But the hut was empty, and he realised that he might grope like a blind
man for hours in the depths of the wood. The one-sided battle which had
broken out in the front of the calvary had died down. He guessed what
had happened, the blunder, the frenzied explanations, and their sequel
in a quick decision to detach a company and surround the wood.

In his exasperation he forgot the silent figure surveying the scene at
the cross-roads, and swore like a very natural man, for he was now
utterly at a loss what to do or where to go.

CHAPTER VIII

A RESPITE

Never before in the course of a somewhat varied life had Dalroy felt so
irresolute, so helplessly the victim of circumstances. Bereft of the
local knowledge possessed by Joos and the other Belgians, any scheme he
adopted must depend wholly on blind chance. The miller had described the
wood as occupying a promontory in a bend of the Meuse, with steep cliffs
forming the southern bank of the river. There was a tow-path; possibly,
a series of narrow ravines or clefts gave precarious access from the
plateau to this lower level. Probably, too, in the first shock of
fright, the people in the hut had made for one of these cuttings, taking
Irene with them. They believed, no doubt, that the Englishman had been
shot or captured, and after that spurt of musketry so alarmingly near at
hand the lower part of the wood would seem alive with enemies.

Dalroy blamed himself, not the others, for this fatal bungling. Before
snatching a much-needed rest he ought to have arranged with Joos a
practicable line of retreat in the event of a night alarm. Of course he
had imposed silence on all as a sort of compulsory relief from the
tension of the earlier hours, but he saw now that he was only too ready
to share the miller's confidence. Not without reason had poor Dr.
Lafarge warned his fellow-countrymen