That he should not have guessed it from the beginning seems odd, if you like, until one stops to consider the matter twice; then, I think, one sees that after all there was no shadow of a reason why he should have done so,—­one sees, indeed, that even had a suspicion of the truth at any time crossed his mind, he would have had the best of reasons for scouting it as nonsense.  It is obvious to us from the first word, because we know instinctively that otherwise there would be no story; it is that which knits a mere sequence of incidents into a coherent, communicable whole.  But, to his perceptions, the thing never presented itself as a story at all.  It wasn’t an anecdote which somebody had buttonholed him to tell; it was an adventure in which he found himself launched, an experience to be enjoyed bit by bit, as it befell, but in no wise suggestive of any single specific climax.  What earthly hint had he received from which to infer the identity of the two women?  On the contrary, weren’t the actions of the one totally inconsistent with what everybody assured him was the manner of life—­with what the necessities of the case led him to believe would be the condition of spirit—­of the other?  If the tale were to be published, the fun would lie, not in attempting to mystify the reader, but in watching with him the mystification of the hero,—­in showing how he played at hoodman-blind with his destiny, and how surprised he was, when, the bandage stripped from his eyes, he saw whom he had caught.

II.

On that first morning,—­the first after his arrival at Saint-Graal, and the first, also, of the many on which they encountered each other in the forest,—­he was bent upon a sentimental pilgrimage to Granjolaye.  He was partly obeying, partly seeking, an emotion.  His mind, inevitably, was full of old memories; the melancholy by which they were attended he found distinctly pleasant, and was inclined to nurse.  To revisit the scene of their boy-and-girl romance, would itself be romantic.  In a little while he would come to the park gates, and could look up the long, straight avenue to the chateau,—­there where, when they were children, twenty years ago, he and she had played so earnestly at being married, burning for each other with one of those strange, inarticulate passions that almost every childhood knows; and where now, worse than widowed, she withheld herself, in silent, mysterious, tragical seclusion.

And then he heard the rhythm of a horse’s hoofs; and looking forward, down the green pathway, between the two walls of forest, he saw a lady cantering towards him.

In an instant she had passed; and it took a little while for the blur of black and white that she had flashed upon his retina to clear into an image—­which even then, from under-exposure, was obscure and piecemeal:  a black riding-habit, of some flexile stuff, that fluttered in a multitude of pretty curves and folds; a small black hat, a toque, set upon a loosely-fastened mass of black hair; a face intensely white—­a softly-rounded face, but intensely white; soft full lips, singularly scarlet; and large eyes, very dark.