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330 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,” he said.