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Jean-Marie finally whipped up his horses at the approach of the party of soldiers, Adet fell backwards from the step of the carriage and was run over by the hind wheels and instantly killed. But his body was never found among the score or so which were left lying there in the mud of the road until the women and old men came to seek their loved ones among the dead.
    Pierre Adet had disappeared. But M. le duc’s vengeance had need of a prey. The outrage which he was quite convinced had been perpetrated against his daughter must be punished by death—if not by the death of the chief offender, then by that of the one who stood nearest to him. Thus was Jean Adet the miller dragged from his home and cast into prison. Was he not implicated himself in the riots? Camille the bailiff had seen and heard him among the insurgents on the hillock that night. At first it was stated that he would be held as hostage for the reappearance of his son. But Pierre Adet had evidently fled the countryside: he was obviously ignorant of the terrible fate which hiw own folly had brought upon his father. Many thought that he had gone to seek his fortune in Paris where his talents and erudition would ensure him a good place in the present mad rush for equality amongst all men. Certain it is that he did not return and that with merciless hate and vengeful relentlessness M. le duc de Kernogan had Jean Adet hanged for a supposed crime said to be committed by his son.
    Jean Adet died protesting his innocence. But the outburst of indignation and revolt aroused by this crying injustice was swamped by the torrent of the revolution which, gathering force by these very acts of tyranny and of injustice, soon swept innocent and guilty alike into a vast whirlpool of blood and shame and tears.

BOOK 1
Chapter One - The Moor
I
    Silence. Loneliness. Desolation.
    And the darkness of late afternoon in November, when the fog from the Bristol Channel had laid its pall upon moor and valley and hill: the last grey glimmer of a wintry sunset had faded in the west: earth and sky are wrapped in the gloomy veils of oncoming night. Some little way ahead a tiny light flickers feebly.
    ‘Surely we cannot be far now.’
    ‘A little more patience, Mounzeer. Twenty minutes and we be there.’
    ‘Twenty minutes, mordieu. And I have ridden since the morning. And you tell me it was not far.’
    ‘Not far, Mounzeer. But we be not ‘orzemen either of us. We doan’t travel very fast.’
    ‘How can I ride fast on this heavy beast? And in this satanι mud. My horse is up to his knees in it. And I am wet–ah! wet to my skin in this sacrι fog of yours.’
    The other made no reply. Indeed he seemed little inclined for conversation: his whole attention appeared to be riveted on the business of keeping in his saddle, and holding his horse’s head turned in the direction in which he wished it to go: he was riding a yard or two ahead of his companion, and it did not need any assurance on his part that he was no horseman: he sat very loosely in his saddle, his broad shoulders bent, his head thrust forward, his knees turned out, his hands clinging alternately to the reins and to the pommel with that ludicrous inconsequent gesture peculiar to those who are wholly unaccustomed to horse exercise.
    His attitude, in fact, as well as the promiscuous set of clothes which he wore—a labourer’s smock, a battered high hat, threadbare corduroys and fisherman’s boots—at once suggested the loafer, the do-nothing who hangs round the yards of halfway houses and posting inns on the chance of earning a few coppers by an easy job which does not entail too much exertion on his part and which will not take him too far from his favourite haunts. When he spoke—which was not often–the soft burr in the pronunciation of the sibilants betrayed the Westcountryman.
    His companion, on the other hand, was obviously a stranger: high of stature, and broadly built, his wide shoulders and large hands and feet, his