which threatened my throat.
But the sun was in my eyes and something struck me on the head. Another
second, and a blow in the breast forced me fairly from the saddle.
Gripping furiously at the air I went down, stunned and dizzy, my last
thought as I struck the ground being of mademoiselle, and the little
brook with the stepping-stones.

CHAPTER XXXV. 'LE ROI EST MORT!'

It was M. d'Agen's breastpiece saved my life by warding off the point
of the varlet's sword, so that the worst injury I got was the loss of
my breath for five minutes, with a swimming in the head and a kind of
syncope. These being past, I found myself on my back on the ground, with
a man's knee on my breast and a dozen horsemen standing round me. The
sky reeled dizzily before my eyes and the men's figures loomed gigantic;
yet I had sense enough to know what had happened to me, and that matters
might well be worse.

Resigning myself to the prospect of captivity, I prepared to ask for
quarter; which I did not doubt I should receive, since they had taken
me in an open skirmish, and honestly, and in the daylight. But the man
whose knee already incommoded me sufficiently, seeing me about to speak,
squeezed me on a sudden so fiercely, bidding me at the same time in a
gruff whisper be silent, that I thought I could not do better than obey.

Accordingly I lay still, and as in a dream, for my brain was still
clouded, heard someone say, 'Dead! Is he? I hoped we had come in time.
Well, he deserved a better fate. Who is he, Rosny?'

'Do you know him, Maignan?' said a voice which sounded strangely
familiar.

The man who knelt; upon me answered, 'No, my lord. He is a stranger to
me. He has the look of a Norman.'

'Like enough!' replied a high-pitched voice I had not heard before. 'For
he rode a good horse. Give me a hundred like it, and a hundred men to
ride as straight, and I would not envy the King of France.'

'Much less his poor cousin of Navarre,' the first speaker rejoined in a
laughing tone, 'without a whole shirt to his back or a doublet that is
decently new. Come, Turenne, acknowledge that you are not so badly off
after all!'

At that word the cloud which had darkened my faculties swept on a sudden
aside. I saw that the men into whose hands I had fallen wore white
favours, their leader a white plume; and comprehended without more that
the King of Navarre had come to my rescue, and beaten off the Leaguers
who had dismounted me. At the same mome