'I am well.'

'Nothing hangs over you?'

'Nothing.'

'Why give me just three days?'

'Pure impatience. Have you forgotten me?'

Their horses walked on with them. They unlocked their hands.

'You knew it was I?' said he.

'Who else could it be? I heard Venice,' she replied.

Her previous cavalier was on his feet, all but on his knees, it
appeared, searching for something that eluded him under the road-side
bank. He sprang at it and waved it, leapt in the saddle, and remarked,
as he drew up beside Renee: 'What one picks from the earth one may wear,
I presume, especially when we can protest it is our property.'

Beauchamp saw him planting a white substance most carefully at the
breast buttonhole of his coat. It could hardly be a flower. Some
drooping exotic of the conservatory perhaps resembled it.

Renee pronounced his name: 'M. le Comte Henri d'Henriel.'

He bowed to Beauchamp with an extreme sweep of the hat.

'Last night, M. Beauchamp, we put up vows for you to the Marine God,
beseeching an exemption from that horrible mal de mer. Thanks to the
storm, I suppose, I have won. I must maintain, madame, that I won.'

'You wear your trophy,' said Renee, and her horse reared and darted
ahead.

The gentleman on each side of her struck into a trot. Beauchamp glanced
at M. d'Henriel's breast-decoration. Renee pressed the pace, and
threading dense covers of foliage they reached the level of the valley,
where for a couple of miles she led them, stretching away merrily, now
in shadow, now in moonlight, between high land and meadow land, and a
line of poplars in the meadows winding with the river that fed the vale
and shot forth gleams of silvery disquiet by rustic bridge and mill.

The strangeness of being beside her, not having yet scanned her face,
marvelling at her voice--that was like and unlike the Renee of old,
full of her, but in another key, a mellow note, maturer--made the
ride magical to Beauchamp, planting the past in the present like a
perceptible ghost.

Renee slackened speed, saying: 'Tourdestelle spans a branch of our
little river. This is our gate. Had it been daylight I would have taken
you by another way, and you would have seen the black tower burnt in the
Revolution; an imposing monument, I am assured. However, you will think
it pretty beside the stream. Do you come with us, M. le Comte?'

His answer was inaudible to Beauchamp; he did not quit them.

The lamp at the lodge-gates presented th