It was not much, certainly, but it persisted.  The impression, defective as I give it, had been pleasing; an impression of warm femininity, of graceful motion.  It had had the quality, besides, of the unexpected and the fugitive, and the advantage of a sylvan background.  Anyhow, it pursued him.  He went on to his journey’s end; stopped before the great gilded grille, with its multiplicity of scrolls and flourishes, its coronets and interlaced initials; gazed up the shadowy aisle of plane-trees to the bit of castle gleaming in the sun at the end; remembered the child Helene, and how he and she had loved each other there, a hundred years ago; and thought of the exiled, worse than widowed woman immured there now:  but it was mere remembering, mere thinking, it was mere cerebration.  The emotion he had looked for did not come.  An essential part of him was elsewhere,—­following the pale lady in the black riding-habit, trying to get a clearer vision of her face, blaming him for his inattention when she had been palpable before him, wondering who she was.

’If she should prove to be a neighbour, I shan’t bore myself so dreadfully down here after all,’ he thought.  ’I wonder if I shall meet her again as I go home.’  She would very likely be returning the way she had gone.  But, though he loitered, he did not meet her again.  He met nobody.  It was, in some measure, the attraction of that lonely forest lane, that one almost never did meet anybody in it.

III.

At Saint-Graal Andre was waiting to lunch with him.

‘When we were children,’ Paul wrote in a letter to Mrs Winchfield, ’Andre, our gardener’s son, and I were as intimate as brothers, he being the only companion of my sex and age the neighbourhood afforded.  But now, after a separation of twenty years, Andre, who has become our cure, insists upon treating me with distance.  He won’t waive the fact that I am the lord of the manor, and calls me relentlessly Monsieur.  I’ve done everything to entice him to unbend, but his backbone is of granite.  From the merriest of mischief-loving youngsters, he has hardened into the solemnest of square-toes, with such a long upper-lip, and manners as stiff as the stuff of his awful best cassock, which he always buckles on prior to paying me a visit.  Whatever is a poor young man to do?  At our first meeting, after my arrival, I fell upon his neck, and thee-and-thou’d him, as of old time; he repulsed me with a vous italicised.  At last I demanded reason.  “Why will you treat me with this inexorable respect?  What have I done to deserve it?  What can I do to forfeit it?” Il devint cramoisi (in the traditional phrase) and stared.—­This is what it is to come back to the home of your infancy.’