Vanished utterly, you understand. I rushed to the spot, and gazed down
into the black abyss. Had he hurled himself over? I had almost made up
my mind that he had done so, when a gentle sound rising and falling came
out of the darkness beneath me. It was his breathing once more, and it
showed me where he must be. He was hiding in the tool-house.

At the edge of the quarry and beneath the summit there is a small
platform upon which stands a wooden hut for the use of the labourers.
It was into this, then, that he had darted. Perhaps he had thought, the
fool, that, in the darkness, I would not venture to follow him. He
little knew Etienne Gerard. With a spring I was on the platform, with
another I was through the doorway, and then, hearing him in the corner,
I hurled myself down upon the top of him.

He fought like a wild cat, but he never had a chance with his shorter
weapon. I think that I must have transfixed him with that first mad
lunge, for, though he struck and struck, his blows had no power in them,
and presently his dagger tinkled down upon the floor. When I was sure
that he was dead, I rose up and passed out into the moonlight. I climbed
on to the heath again, and wandered across it as nearly out of my mind
as a man could be.

With the blood singing in my ears, and my naked sword still clutched in
my hand, I walked aimlessly on until, looking round me, I found that I
had come as far as the glade of the Abbot's Beech, and saw in the
distance that gnarled stump which must ever be associated with the most
terrible moment of my life. I sat down upon a fallen trunk with my sword
across my knees and my head between my hands, and I tried to think about
what had happened and what would happen in the future.