This, though the day and the road were warrants for all cheerful thoughts.  On one side vineyards clothed the warm red slopes, and rose in steps from the valley to the white buildings of a convent.  On the other the stream wound through green flats where the black cattle stood knee-deep in grass, watched by wild-eyed and half-naked youths.  Again the travellers lost sight of the Loir, and crossing a shoulder, rode through the dim aisles of a beech-forest, through deep rustling drifts of last year’s leaves.  And out again and down again they passed, and turning aside from the gateway, trailed along beneath the brown machicolated wall of an old town, from the crumbling battlements of which faces half-sleepy, half-suspicious, watched them as they moved below through the glare and heat.  Down to the river-level again, where a squalid anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them, and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the hour of Nones.

And still he said nothing, and she, cowed by his mysterious gaiety, yet spurning herself for her cowardice, was silent also.  He hoped to arrive at Angers before nightfall.  What, she wondered, shivering, would happen there?  What was he planning to do to her?  How would he punish her?  Brave as she was, she was a woman, with a woman’s nerves; and fear and anticipation got upon them; and his silence—­his silence which must mean a thing worse than words!

And then on a sudden, piercing all, a new thought.  Was it possible that he had other letters?  If his bearing were consistent with anything, it was consistent with that.  Had he other genuine letters, or had he duplicate letters, so that he had lost nothing, but instead had gained the right to rack and torture her, to taunt and despise her?

That thought stung her into sudden self-betrayal.  They were riding along a broad dusty track which bordered a stone causey raised above the level of winter floods.  Impulsively she turned to him.

“You have other letters!” she cried.  “You have other letters!” And freed for the moment from her terror, she fixed her eyes on his and strove to read his face.

He looked at her, his mouth grown hard.  “What do you mean, Madame?” he asked,

“You have other letters?”

“For whom?”

“From the King, for Angers!”

He saw that she was going to confess, that she was going to derange his cherished plan; and unreasonable anger awoke in the man who had been more than willing to forgive a real injury.

“Will you explain?” he said between his teeth.  And his eyes glittered unpleasantly.  “What do you mean?”

“You have other letters,” she cried, “besides those which I stole.”

“Which you stole?” He repeated the words without passion.  Enraged by this unexpected turn, he hardly knew how to take it.

“Yes, I!” she cried.  “I!  I took them from under your pillow!”