toiled and sweated over the stubble to rejoin his satirical comrade.
That gentleman, as he smoked his cigar, had arrived, by a process of
calculation based on the altitude of the sun, to the conclusion that
it must be about five o'clock.

"Where the devil are we?" asked the stout sportsman. He wiped his brow
as he spoke, and propped himself against a tree in the field opposite
his companion, feeling quite unequal to clearing the broad ditch that
lay between them.

"And you ask that question of _me_!" retorted the other, laughing from
his bed of tall brown grasses on the top of the bank. He flung the end
of his cigar into the ditch, exclaiming, "I swear by Saint Hubert that
no one shall catch me risking myself again in a country that I don't
know with a magistrate, even if, like you, my dear d'Albon, he happens
to be an old schoolfellow."

"Why, Philip, have you really forgotten your own language? You surely
must have left your wits behind you in Siberia," said the stouter of
the two, with a glance half-comic, half-pathetic at the guide-post
distant about a hundred paces from them.

"I understand," replied the one addressed as Philip. He snatched up
his rifle, suddenly sprang to his feet, made but one jump of it into
the field, and rushed off to the guide-post. "This way, d'Albon, here
you are! left about!" he shouted, gesticulating in the direction of
the highroad. "_To Baillet and l'Isle-Adam!_" he went on; "so if we go
along here, we shall be sure to come upon the cross-road to Cassan."

"Quite right, Colonel," said M. d'Albon, putting the cap with which he