The downfall of his plan for dazzling her by a magnanimity unparalleled and beyond compare, a plan dependent on the submission of Angers--his disappointment in this might have roused the worst passions of a better man.

But there was in this man a pride on a level at least with his other passions: and to bear himself in this hour of defeat and flight so that if she could not love him she must admire him, checked in a strange degree the current of his rage.
When Tignonville presently looked back he found that Count Hannibal and six of his riders had pulled up and were walking their horses far in the rear.

On which he would have done the same himself; but Badelon called over his shoulder the eternal "Forward, Monsieur, _en avant_!" and sullenly, hating the man and his master more deeply every hour, Tignonville was forced to push on, with thoughts of vengeance in his heart.
Trot, trot! Trot, trot! Through a country which had lost its smiling wooded character and grew more sombre and less fertile the farther they left the Loire behind them.

Trot, trot! Trot, trot!--for ever, it seemed to some.

Javette wept with fatigue, and the other women were little better.