"This will be a hard jolt for the old chap," I thought, "but he'll say
that I played the game."

And Esme Falconer, my own brave, lovely Esme! "She has come down the
staircase now," I told myself. "She has untied Marie-Jeanne. She has
gone out and started the car." What would she think of my disappearance?
Well, she wouldn't misjudge me, I felt sure; and neither would
Jean-Herve-Marie-Olivier. He would know that I was acting as, in my
place, he would have acted, that I didn't mean to let Franz von Blenheim
defy France and go off untouched.

The whole world seemed mysteriously to have narrowed to one girl, Esme.
How I had lived before I saw her; how, having seen her, I could ever
have lived without her,--I didn't know. But the sound of grinding
brakes roused me. We were slowing up in obedience to a signal from
a canvas-covered, half-demolished shelter filled with men in blue
uniforms; we were coming to a standstill. Blenheim leaned out, and for a
moment I saw his face in the beam of light from the sentry's lantern. It
looked thin and set. He was giving beneath the strain.

"Behold my comrade!" He thrust our papers into the hands of the sentry.
"And make haste, for the love of heaven! We are waited for _la-bas_."

I cast a quick glance at my body-guard, whose anxious eyes were on the
sentinel. His pistol still lay against my side, but his thoughts were
far away. It was the moment. With the rapidity of lightning I
knocked his arm up, caught his wrist, and clung to it, calling out
simultaneously in a voice of crisp command.

"My friends," I cried in French, "I order you to arrest these persons!
They are agents of the kaiser! They are German spies!"

The pistol, clutched between us, exploded harmlessly into the air.
I head shouts, saw men running toward us. Then I caught sight of
Blenheim's face, dark and oddly contorted; he had turned and was
leveling his revolver at me, resting one knee on the driver's seat as he
took deliberate aim.

"I say," I cried again, struggling for the weapon, "that this is Franz
von Blenheim, that these are men of the kaiser, spying, in disguise--"

It seemed to me that some one caught Blenheim's arm from behind just as
he fired; but I was not certain. For suddenly that same whistling shriek
sounded over us, nearer this time, more ominous; the earth seemed
to rock and then to end in a mighty shock and cataclysm. Blackness
enveloped me, and I dropped into a bottomless pit.

CHAPTER