He was heard, for the lady turned about, and as he rode down, still uncertain of her, she came cantering up alone, and there could be no uncertainty.

Moonlight is friendless to eyes that would make sure of a face long unseen.  It was Renee whose hand he clasped, but the story of the years on her, and whether she was in bloom, or wan as the beams revealing her, he could not see.

Her tongue sounded to him as if it were loosened without a voice.  ’You have come.  That storm!  You are safe!’

So phantom-like a sound of speech alarmed him.  ’I lost no time.  But you?’

‘I am well.’

‘Nothing hangs over you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why give me just three days?’

‘Pure impatience.  Have you forgotten me?’

Their horses walked on with them.  They unlocked their hands.

‘You knew it was I?’ said he.

‘Who else could it be?  I heard Venice,’ she replied.

Her previous cavalier was on his feet, all but on his knees, it appeared, searching for something that eluded him under the road-side bank.  He sprang at it and waved it, leapt in the saddle, and remarked, as he drew up beside Renee:  ’What one picks from the earth one may wear, I presume, especially when we can protest it is our property.’

Beauchamp saw him planting a white substance most carefully at the breast buttonhole of his coat.  It could hardly be a flower.  Some drooping exotic of the conservatory perhaps resembled it.

Renee pronounced his name:  ‘M. le Comte Henri d’Henriel.’

He bowed to Beauchamp with an extreme sweep of the hat.

’Last night, M. Beauchamp, we put up vows for you to the Marine God, beseeching an exemption from that horrible mal de mer.  Thanks to the storm, I suppose, I have won.  I must maintain, madame, that I won.’

‘You wear your trophy,’ said Renee, and her horse reared and darted ahead.

The gentleman on each side of her struck into a trot.  Beauchamp glanced at M. d’Henriel’s breast-decoration.  Renee pressed the pace, and threading dense covers of foliage they reached the level of the valley, where for a couple of miles she led them, stretching away merrily, now in shadow, now in moonlight, between high land and meadow land, and a line of poplars in the meadows winding with the river that fed the vale and shot forth gleams of silvery disquiet by rustic bridge and mill.

The strangeness of being beside her, not having yet scanned her face, marvelling at her voice—­that was like and unlike the Renee of old, full of her, but in another key, a mellow note, maturer—­made the ride magical to Beauchamp, planting the past in the present like a perceptible ghost.

Renee slackened speed, saying:  ’Tourdestelle spans a branch of our little river.  This is our gate.  Had it been daylight I would have taken you by another way, and you would have seen the black tower burnt in the Revolution; an imposing monument, I am assured.  However, you will think it pretty beside the stream.  Do you come with us, M. le Comte?’