s visible to
her. Her confidence stung him as a whip, and when in place of
answering he looked away, the girl fancied that a smothered groan
escaped him. She waited, curiously expectant, but he did not speak,
and just then the fall of hoofs rose from behind the birches in the
bluff. Then a man's voice came through it singing a little French
song, and Maud Barrington glanced at her companion.

"Lance," she said, "how long is it since you sang that song?"

"Well," said Winston, doggedly conscious of what he was doing, "I do
not know a word of it, and never heard it in my life."

Maud Barrington stared at him. "Think," she said. "It seems ever so
long ago, but you cannot have forgotten. Surely you remember Madame
Aubert, who taught me to prattle in French, and the day you slipped
into the music-room and picked up the song, while she tried in vain to
teach it me. Can't you recollect how I cried, when you sang it in the
billiard-room, and Uncle Geoffrey gave you the half-sovereign which had
been promised to me?"

"No," said Winston, a trifle hoarsely, and with his head turned from
her watched the trail.

A man in embroidered deerskin jacket was riding into the moonlight, and
though the little song had ceased, and the wide hat hid his face, there
was an almost insolent gracefulness in his carriage that seemed
familiar to Winston. It was not the _abandon_ of the swashbuckler
stock-rider from across the frontier, but something more finished and
distinguished that suggested the bygone cavalier. Maud Barrington, it
was evident, also noticed it.

"Geoffrey Courthorne rode as that man does," she said. "I remember
hearing my mother once tell him that he had been born too late, because
his attributes and tastes would have fitted him to follow Prince
Rupert."

Winston made no answer, and the man rode on until he drew bridle in
front of them. Then he swung his hat off, and while the moonlight
shone into his face looked down with a little ironical smile at the man
and woman standing beside the horse. Winston closed one hand a trifle,
and slowly straightened himself, feeling that there was need of all his
self-control, for he saw his companion glance at him, and then almost
too steadily at Lance Courthorne.

The latter said nothing for a space of seconds, for which Winston hated
him, and yet in the tension of the suspense he noticed that the signs
of indulgence he had seen on the last occasion were plainer in
Court