It was not so loud now, but it was distinctly heard.  It had been heavy breathing, and now she was trying to check it and half succeeding—­but at the cost of little cries.  They both knew it was a woman, and that she was in the arbour, on the other side of the little table.  She must have been there when they came in.

“Who is that?”

There was no answer to him save the checked breathing and another broken cry.  She moved, and it helped him to see vaguely the outlines of a girl who seemed to be drawing back from him in terror.  He thought she was crouching now in the farthest corner.

“Come away,” he said.  But Lady Pippinworth would not let him go.  They must know who this woman was.  He remembered that a match-stand usually lay on the tables of those arbours, and groped until he found one.

“Who are you?”

He struck a match.  They were those French matches that play an infernal interlude before beginning to burn.  While he waited he knew that she was begging him, with her hands and with cries that were too little to be words, not to turn its light on her.  But he did.

Then she ceased to cower.  The girlish dignity that had been hers so long came running back to her.  As she faced him there was even a crooked smile upon her face.

[Illustration:  “I woke up,” she said.]

“I woke up,” she said, as if the words had no meaning to herself, but might have some to him.

The match burned out before he spoke, but his face was terrible.  “Grizel!” he said, appalled; and then, as if the discovery was as awful to her as to him, she uttered a cry of horror and sped out into the night.  He called her name again, and sprang after her; but the hand of another woman detained him.

“Who is this girl?” Lady Pippinworth demanded fiercely; but he did not answer.  He recoiled from her with a shudder that she was not likely to forget, and hurried on.  All that night he searched for Grizel in vain.

CHAPTER XXX

THE LITTLE GODS DESERT HIM

And all next day he searched like a man whose eyes would never close again.  She had not passed the night in any inn or village house of St. Gian; of that he made certain by inquiries from door to door.  None of the guides had seen her, though they are astir so late and so early, patiently waiting at the hotel doors to be hired, that there seems to be no night for them—­darkness only, that blots them out for a time as they stand waiting.  At all hours there is in St. Gian the tinkle of bells, the clatter of hoofs, the crack of a whip, dust in retreat; but no coachman brought him news.  The streets were thronged with other coachmen on foot looking into every face in quest of some person who wanted to return to the lowlands, but none had looked into her face.

Within five minutes of the hotel she might have been on any of half a dozen roads.  He wandered or rushed along them all for a space, and came back.  One of them was short and ended in the lake.  All through that long and beautiful day this miserable man found himself coming back to the road that ended in the lake.