g eagerly
together at the opening of the path, Manilof and Boris having already
gone forward. The so-called tenor hesitated. An instinct seemed to
warn him not to risk himself alone in company with those three men.
He decided at last to go on, and Sonia looked at him as he mounted
the path, all the while stroking her cheek with a bouquet of purple
cyclamen, those mountain violets, the leaf of which is lined with the
same fresh colour as the flowers.

The landau proceeded slowly. The driver got down to walk in front with
other comrades, and the convoy of more than fifteen empty vehicles,
drawn nearer together by the steepness of the road, rolled silently
along. Tartarin, greatly agitated, and foreboding something sinister,
dared not look at his companion, so much did he fear that a word or a
look might compel him to be an actor in the drama he felt impending. But
Sonia was paying no attention to him; her eyes were rather fixed, and
she did not cease caressing the down of her skin mechanically with the
flowers.

"So," she said at length, "so you know who we are, I and my friends...
Well, what do you think of us? What do Frenchmen think of us?"

The hero turned pale, then red. He was desirous of not offending by
rash or imprudent words such vindictive beings; on the other hand, how
consort with murderers? He got out of it by a metaphor:--

"_Differemment_, mademoiselle, you were telling me just now that we
belonged to the same brotherhood, hunters of hydras and monsters,
despots and carnivora... It is therefore to a companion of St. Hubert
that I now make answer... My sentiment is that, even against wild beasts
we should use loyal weapons... Our Jules Gerard, a famous lion-slayer,
employed explosive balls. I myself have never given in to that, I do
not use them... When I hunted the lion or the panther I planted myself
before the beast, face to face, with a good double-barrelled carbine,
and pan! pan! a ball in each eye."

"In each eye!.." repeated Sonia.

"Never did I miss my aim."

He affirmed it and he believed it.

The young girl looked at him with naive admiration, thinking aloud:--

"That must certainly be the surest way."

A sudden rending of the branches and the underbrush, and the thicket
parted above them, so quickly and in so feline a way that Tartarin, his
head now full of hunting adventures, might have thought himself still on
the watch in the Zaccar. But Manilof sprang from the slope, noiselessly,