CHAPTER SEVENFor Elvina the next three days passed in a kind of nightmare in which she marched and slept and marched again until she was past thinking of anything except the effort of putting one foot in front of the other.
At times she felt that she could go no farther and that she must drop out as so many of the soldiers were doing.
She passed them lying in crumpled heaps on the mountainside, their eyes closed in the sleep of utter exhaustion that no longer could be denied.
Only the fact that Lord Wye was beside her kept her going. She clung to him and he pulled her along the rough stony roads where Marshal Soult’s columns, strung out like heavily moving snakes, had no room to deploy.
“I will carry you,” he said more than once, but she shook her head.
“If you are well enough to carr
