The mob following saw too, and gave a hoot and yell of brutal triumph; their prey was in their clutches; the cart barred his progress, and he must double like a fox faced with a stone wall.
Scarcely!--they did not know the man with whom they had to deal--the daring and the coolness that the languid surface of indolent fashion had covered.

Even in the imminence of supreme peril, of breathless jeopardy, he measured with unerring eye the distance and the need; rose as lightly in the air as Forest King had risen with him over fence and hedge; and with a single, running leap cleared the width of the mules' backs, and landing safely on the farther side, dashed on; scarcely pausing for breath.

The yell that hissed in his wake, as the throng saw him escape, by what to their slow Teutonic instincts seemed a devil's miracle, was on his ear like the bay of the slot-hounds to the deer.

They might kill him, if they could; but they should never take him captive.
And the moon was so brightly, so pitilessly clear; shining down in the summer light, as though in love with the beauty of earth! He looked up once; the stars seemed reeling round him in disordered riot; the chill face of the moon looked unpitying as death.

All this loveliness was round him; this glory of sailing cloud and shadowy forest and tranquil planet, and there was no help for him.
A gay burst of music broke on the stillness from the distance; he had left the brilliance of the town behind him, and was now in its by-streets and outskirts.