let him go. They
must know who this woman was. He remembered that a match-stand usually
lay on the tables of those arbours, and groped until he found one.

"Who are you?"

He struck a match. They were those French matches that play an
infernal interlude before beginning to burn. While he waited he knew
that she was begging him, with her hands and with cries that were too
little to be words, not to turn its light on her. But he did.

Then she ceased to cower. The girlish dignity that had been hers so
long came running back to her. As she faced him there was even a
crooked smile upon her face.

[Illustration: "I woke up," she said.]

"I woke up," she said, as if the words had no meaning to herself, but
might have some to him.

The match burned out before he spoke, but his face was terrible.
"Grizel!" he said, appalled; and then, as if the discovery was as
awful to her as to him, she uttered a cry of horror and sped out into
the night. He called her name again, and sprang after her; but the
hand of another woman detained him.

"Who is this girl?" Lady Pippinworth demanded fiercely; but he did not
answer. He recoiled from her with a shudder that she was not likely to
forget, and hurried on. All that night he searched for Grizel in vain.

CHAPTER XXX

THE LITTLE GODS DESERT HIM

And all next day he searched like a man whose eyes would never close
again. She had not passed the night in any inn or village house of St.
Gian; of that he made certain by inquiries from door to door. None of
the guides had seen her, though they are astir so late and so early,
patiently waiting at the hotel doors to be hired, that there seems to
be no night for them--darkness only, that blots them out for a time as
they stand waiting. At all hours there is in St. Gian the tinkle of
bells, the clatter of hoofs, the crack of a whip, dust in retreat; but
no coachman brought him news. The streets were thronged with other
coachmen on foot looking into every face in quest of some person who
wanted to return to the lowlands, but none had looked into her face.

Within five minutes of the hotel she might have been on any of half a
dozen roads. He wandered or rushed along them all for a space, and
came back. One of them was short and ended in the lake. All through
that long and beautiful day this miserable man found himself coming
back to the road that ended in the lake.

There were moments when he cried to himself that it was an appar