shall walk--unless you are in a hurry."

"No more than you are, dear," she said, gravely.

He looked at her with sudden suspicion, but she was not smiling.

"Very well," he said, gloomily.

About eleven o'clock he had sauntered half the distance down the
forest road that leads to the Chateau de Nesville. His heart
seemed to tug and tug and urge him forward; his legs refused
obedience; he sulked. But there was the fresh smell of loam and
moss and aromatic leaves, the music of the Lisse on the pebbles,
the joyous chorus of feathered creatures from every thicket, and
there were the antics of the giddy young rabbits that scuttled
through the warrens, leaping, tumbling, sitting up, lop-eared and
impudent, or diving head-first into their burrows.

Under the stems of a thorn thicket two cock-pheasants were having a
difference, and were enthusiastically settling that difference in the
approved method of game-cocks. He lingered to see which might win,
but a misstep and a sudden crack of a dry twig startled them, and
they withdrew like two stately but indignant old gentlemen who had
been subjected to uncalled-for importunities.

Presently he felt cheerful enough to smoke, and he searched in
every pocket for his pipe. Then he remembered that he had dropped
it when he dropped his silver flask, there in the road where he
had first been startled by the Uhlans.

This train of thought depressed him again, but he resolutely put
it from his mind, lighted a cigarette, and moved on.

Just ahead, around the bend in the path, lay the grass-grown
carrefour where he had first seen Lorraine. He thought of her as
he remembered her then, flushed, indignant, blocking the path
while the map-making spy sneered in her face and crowded past
her, still sneering. He thought, too, of her scarlet skirt, and
the little velvet bodice and the silver chains. He thought of her
heavy hair, dishevelled, glimmering in her eyes. At the same
moment he turned the corner; the carrefour lay before him,
overgrown, silent, deserted. A sudden tenderness filled his
heart--ah, how we love those whom we have protected!--and he
stood for a moment in the sunshine with bowed head, living over
the episode that he could never forget. Every word, every
gesture, the shape of the very folds in her skirt, he remembered;
yes, and the little triangular tear, the broken silver chain, the
ripped bodice!

And she, in her innocence, had promised to see him there at the
river