“I am so weak,” said the prince, “so pitiably weak! I thought to frighten the woman by starving myself, poor fool that I was!”
And they went on again. Maurice was beginning to feel the effect of his wine-bibbing; he had a splitting headache.
“Silence!” he suddenly whispered, sinking and dragging the prince with him.
A hundred yards in advance of them stood a sentinel, his body bent forward and a hand to his ear. Presently he, too, lay down. Five minutes passed. The sentinel rose, and convinced that his ears had tricked him, resumed his lonely patrol. He disappeared toward the west, while the fugitives made off in an easterly direction. Maurice was a soldier again. Every two or three hundred yards he knelt and pressed his ear to the cold, damp earth and waited for a familiar jar. The prince watched these movements with interest.
“Yes. Perhaps we had better strike out for the mountains. The sentry line can not extend as far as this.”
But now they could see the drab peaks of the mountains which loomed between the partly dismantled trees. Beyond lay the kingdom. Would they ever reach it? There was only one pass; this they dared not make. Yet if they attempted to cross the mountains in a deserted place, they might very easily get lost; for in some locations it was fully six miles across the range, and this, with the ups and downs and windings in and out, might lengthen into twenty miles. They struck out toward the mountains, and after half an hour they came upon an unforeseen obstacle. They sat down in despair. This obstacle was the river, not very, wide, but deep, turbulent and impassable.
“We shall have to risk the pass,” said Maurice, gloomily; “though heaven knows how we are to get through it. We have ten shots between us.”
They followed the river. The roar of it deadened all other sounds. For a mile they plodded on, silent, watchful and meditative. The prince thought of his love; Maurice tried to forget his. For him the romance had come to an end, its logical end; and it was now only a question of getting back to the world to which he belonged and remaining there. He recalled a line he had read somewhere: a deep love, gashes into the soul as a scar is hewn upon the body and remains there during the whole life...