He was successful--a few hurried shots followed from the road, but struck above him.
He clambered back quickly to where she was still crouching.
"They were the vedettes," he said, "but they have fallen back on the main skirmish line and will be here in force in a moment.

Go--while you can." She had not moved.

He tried to raise her--her hat fell off---he saw blood oozing from where the vedette's bullet that had missed him had pierced her brain.
And yet he saw in that pale dead face only the other face which he remembered now had been turned like this towards his own.

It was very strange.

And this was the end, and this was his expiation! He raised his own face humbly, blindly, despairingly to the inscrutable sky; it looked back upon him from above as coldly as the dead face had from below.
Yet out of this he struck a faint idea that he voiced aloud in nearly the same words which he had used to Colonel Starbottle only three years ago.