--yet always counting the hours till he should see the
slight, worn figure which for a year had been hidden from him.

He dined in the well-known restaurant, wandered again in the mild
dusk, then mounted to his room and worked a while at some of the
sketches he was making for his new commission. While he was so
engaged, a carriage drew up below, and two persons descended. He
recognised Lord Findon, much aged and whitened in these last years.
The lady in deep mourning behind him paused a moment on the broad
pathway, and looked round her, at the hill of the chateau, at
the bright lights in the restaurant. She threw back her veil, and
Fenwick's heart leapt as he recognised the spiritual beauty, the
patient sweetness of a face which through twelve troubled years had
kept him from evil and held him to good--had been indeed 'the master
light' of all his seeing.

And to his best and only friend he had lied, persistently and
unforgiveably, for twelve years. There was the sting--and there the
pity of it.

CHAPTER X

Eugenie de Pastourelles was sitting on the terrace at Versailles. Or
rather she was established in one of the deep embrasures between the
windows, on the western side. The wind was cold, but again a glorious
sun bathed the terrace and the chateau. It was a day of splendour--a
day when heaven and earth seemed to have conspired to flatter and to
adorn the vast creation of Louis Quatorze, this white, flaming palace,
amid the gold and bronze of its autumn trees, and the blue of its
waters. Superb clouds, of a royal sweep and amplitude, sailed through
the brilliant sky; the woods that girdled the horizon were painted
broadly and solidly in the richest colour upon an immense canvas
steeped in light. In some of the nearer alleys which branch from the
terrace, the eye travelled, through a deep magnificence of shade, to
an arched and framed sunlight beyond, embroidered with every radiant
or sparkling colour; in others, the trees, almost bare, met lightly
arched above a carpet of intensest green--a _tapis vert_ stretching
toward a vaporous distance, and broken by some god, or nymph, on whose
white shoulders the autumn leaves were dropping softly one by one.

Wide horizons, infinitely clear--a blazing intensity of light, beating
on the palace, the gardens, the statues, and the distant water of
the 'Canal de Versailles'--each tint and outline, sharp and vehement,
full-bodied and rich--the greenest greens, the blues