Page:The Teeth of the Tiger - Leblanc - 1914.djvu/217

 carefully for, in the growing darkness of the twilight, he had every reason to fear renewed attacks from the enemy.

He now became aware of something which he had not perceived before. The bank ran along the top of the wall, which at this spot was quite sixteen feet high. Gaston Sauverand and Florence had, beyond a doubt, escaped this way.

Perenna followed the wall, which was fairly wide, till he came to a lower part, and here he jumped into a ploughed field skirting a little wood toward which the fugitives must have run. He started exploring it, but, realizing its denseness, he at once saw that it was waste of time to linger in pursuit.

He therefore returned to the village, while thinking over this, his latest exploit. Once again Florence and her accomplice had tried to get rid of him. Once again Florence figured prominently in this network of criminal plots.

At the moment when chance informed Don Luis that old Langernault had probably died by foul play, at the moment when chance, by leading him to Hanged Man's Barn, as he christened it, brought him into the presence of two skeletons, Florence appeared as a murderous vision, as an evil genius who was seen wherever death had passed with its trail of blood and corpses.

"Oh, the loathsome creature!" he muttered, with a shudder. "How can she have so fair a face, and eyes of such haunting beauty, so grave, sincere, and almost guileless?"

In the church square, outside the inn, Mazeroux, who had returned, was filling the petrol tank of the motor and lighting the lamps. Don Luis saw the mayor of Damigni crossing the square. He took him aside.