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,” he said.

“Have told them?”

“He came by the other road, and it is quicker.”

She gazed at him in astonishment, her lips parted; and slowly she understood, and her eyes grew hard.

“Then why,” she said, “did you say it was longer.  Had we been overtaken, Monsieur, we had had you to thank for it, it seems!”

He bit his lip.  “But we have not been overtaken,” he rejoined.  “On the contrary, you have me to thank for something quite different.”

“As unwelcome, perhaps!” she retorted.  “For what?”

“Softly, Madame.”