eed the pursuit
that thundered in his wake.

The by-lanes he took were deserted, and he was now well-nigh out of the
town, with the open country and forest lying before him. The people whom
he met rushed out of his path; happily for him they were few, and were
terrified, because they thought him a madman broken loose from his
keepers. He never looked back; but he could tell that the pursuit was
falling farther and farther behind him, that the speed at which he went
was breaking the powers of his hunters; fresh throngs added indeed to
the first pursuers as they tore down through the starlight night, but
none had the science with which he went, the trained, matchless skill
of the university foot-race. He left them more and more behind him each
second of the breathless chase, that, endless as it seemed, had lasted
bare three minutes. If the night were but dark! He felt that pitiless
luminance glistening bright about him everywhere; shining over all the
summer world, and leaving scarce a shadow to fall athwart his way. The
silver glory of the radiance was shed on every rood of ground; one hour
of a winter night, one hour of the sweeping ink-black rain of an autumn
storm, and he could have made for shelter as the stag makes for it
across the broad, brown Highland water.

Before him stretched indeed the gloom of the masses of pine, the upward
slopes of tree-stocked hills, the vastness of the Black Forest; but they
were like the mirage to a man who dies in a desert; he knew, at the pace
he went, he could not live to reach them. The blood was beating in his
brain and pumping from his heart; a tightness like an iron band seemed
girt about his loins, his lips began to draw his breath in with
loud gasping spasms; he knew that in a little space his speed must
slacken--he knew it by the roar, like the noise of water, that was
rushing on his ear, and the oppression, like a hand's hard grip, that
seemed above his heart.

But he would go till he died; go till they fired on him; go, though the
skies felt swirling round like a sea of fire, and the hard, hot earth
beneath his feet jarred his whole frame as his feet struck it flying.

The angle of an old wood house, with towering roof and high-peaked
gables, threw a depth of shadow at last across his road; a shadow black
and rayless, darker for the white glisten of the moon around. Built more
in the Swiss than the German style, a massive balcony of wood ran round
it, upon and beneath w