l de Mar, Vidame de Bezers. As
he sat on the terrace, now eyeing us askance, and now paying Catherine
a compliment, I likened him to a great cat before which a butterfly has
all unwittingly flirted her prettiness. Poor Catherine! No doubt she
had her own reasons for uneasiness; more reasons I fancy than I then
guessed. For she seemed to have lost her voice. She stammered and
made but poor replies; and Madame Claude being deaf and stupid, and we
boys too timid after the rebuff we had experienced to fill the gap, the
conversation languished. The Vidame was not for his part the man to
put himself out on a hot day.

It was after one of these pauses--not the first but the longest--that I
started on finding his eyes fixed on mine. More, I shivered. It is
hard to describe, but there was a look in the Vidame's eyes at that
moment which I had never seen before. A look of pain almost: of dumb
savage alarm at any rate. From me they passed slowly to Marie and
mutely interrogated him. Then the Vidame's glance travelled back to
Catherine, and settled on her.

Only a moment before she had been but too conscious of his presence.
Now, as it chanced by bad luck, or in the course of Providence,
something had drawn her attention elsewhere. She was unconscious of
his regard. Her own eyes were fixed in a far-away gaze. Her colour
was high, her lips were parted, her bosom heaved gently.

The shadow deepened on the Vidame's face. Slowly he took his eyes from
hers, and looked northwards also.

Caylus Castle stands on a rock in the middle of the narrow valley of
that name. The town clusters about the ledges of the rock so closely
that when I was a boy I could fling a stone clear of the houses. The
hills are scarcely five hundred yards distant on either side, rising in
tamer colours from the green fields about the brook. It is possible
from the terrace to see the whole valley, and the road which passes
through it lengthwise. Catherine's eyes were on the northern extremity
of the defile, where the highway from Cahors descends from the uplands.
She had been sitting with her face turned that way all the afternoon.

I looked that way too. A solitary horseman was descending the steep
track from the hills.

"Mademoiselle!" cried the Vidame suddenly. We all looked up. His tone
was such that the colour fled from Kit's face. There was something in
his voice she had never heard in any voice before--something that to a
woman wa