mist hid all, but the
knowledge that they were there set her heart beating, brought tears to
her eyes, and lightened the long road to Challans.

At Challans they halted half an hour, and washed out the horses' mouths
with water and a little _guignolet_--the spirit of the country. A dose
of the cordial was administered to the women; and a little after seven
they began the last stage of the journey, through a landscape which even
the mist could not veil from the eyes of love. There rose the windmill
of Soullans! There the old dolmen, beneath which the grey wolf that ate
the two children of Tornic had its lair. For a mile back they had been
treading my lady's land; they had only two more leagues to ride, and one
of those was crumbling under each dogged footfall. The salt flavour,
which is new life to the shore-born, was in the fleecy reek which floated
by them, now thinner, now more opaque; and almost they could hear the
dull thunder of the Biscay waves falling on the rocks.

Tignonville looked back at her and smiled. She caught the look; she
fancied that she understood it and his thoughts. But her own eyes were
moist at the moment with tears, and what his said, and what there was of
strangeness in his glance, half-warning, half-exultant, escaped her. For
there, not a mile before them, where the low hills about the fishing
village began to rise from the dull inland level--hills green on the land
side, bare and scarped towards the sea and the island--she espied the
wayside chapel at which the nurse of her early childhood had told her
beads. Where it stood, the road from Commequiers and the road she
travelled became one: a short mile thence, after winding among the
hillocks, it ran down to the beach and the causeway--and to her home.

At the sight she bethought herself of Carlat, and calling to M. de
Tignonville, she asked him what he thought of the steward's continued
absence.

"He must have outpaced us!" he answered, with an odd laugh.

"But he must have ridden hard to do that."

He reined back to her. "Say nothing!" he muttered under his breath. "But
look ahead, Madame, and see if we are expected!"

"Expected? How can we be expected?" she cried. The colour rushed into
her face.

He put his finger to his lip, and looked warningly at Badelon's humped
shoulders, jogging up and down in front of them. Then, stooping towards
her, in a lower tone, "If Carlat has arrived before us, he will have told
them,"