My
guardian's gray head rose before me. My heart tightened. The finest,
straightest old chap who ever took a forlorn little tike in out of the
wet, and petted him, and frolicked with him, and filled his stocking all
the year round, and made his holidays things of rapture, and taught him
how to ride and shoot and fish and swim and cut his losses and do pretty
much everything that makes life worth living--that was Dunny.
"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.
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