The next day, ’Yes, I suppose it’s very pretty.  But I wasn’t thinking of Nature,’ he informed her, as she approached.

She drew up.

‘Oh, it has its human interest too, no doubt.’  She glanced in the direction of the Chateau of Granjolaye.

‘The Queen,’ said he.  ‘But one never sees her.’

’That adds the charm of mystery, don’t you feel?  To think of that poor young exiled woman, after so grand a beginning, ending so desolately—­shut up alone in her mysterious castle!  It’s like a legend.’

‘Then you’re not of her Court?’

‘I?  Of her Court? Mais quelle idee!’

’It was only a hypothesis.  Of course, you know I’m devoured by curiosity.  My days are spent in wondering who you are.’

She laughed.  ‘You must have a care, or you’ll be typical,’ she warned him.

‘I never said I wasn’t human,’ he called after her, as she cantered away.

VIII.

The next day still (the fifteenth), ’Haven’t I heard you lived at Saint-Graal when you were a child?’ she asked.

’If you have, for once in a way rumour has told the truth.  I lived at Saint-Graal till I was thirteen.’

‘Then perhaps you knew her?’

‘Her?’

‘The Queen.  Mademoiselle de la Granjolaye de Ravanches.’

‘Oh, I knew her very well—­when we were children.’

‘Tell me all about her.’

‘It would be a long story.’

She leaped from her horse; then, raising her riding whip, and looking the animal severely in the eye, ‘Bezigue!  Attention,’ she said impressively.  ’You’re to stop exactly where you are and not play any tricks. Entendu?  Bien.’  She moved a few steps down the pathway, and stopped at an opening among the trees, where the ground was a cushion of bright green moss.  ‘By Jove, she is at her ease,’ thought Paul, who followed her.  ‘How splendidly she walks—­what undulations!’ From the French point of view, as she must be aware, the situation gave him all sorts of rights.

She sank softly, gracefully, upon the moss.

‘It’s a long story.  Tell it me,’ she commanded, and pointed to the earth.  He sat down facing her, at a little distance.

‘It’s odd you should have chosen this place,’ said he.

‘Odd?  Why?’ She looked at him inquiringly.  For a moment their eyes held each other; and all at once the blood swept through him with suffocating violence.  She was so beautiful, so sumptuous, so warmly and richly feminine; and surely the circumstances were not anodyne.  Her softly rounded face, its very pallor, the curve and colour of her lips, her luminous dark eyes, the smooth modulations of her voice, and then her loose abundance of black hair, and the swelling lines of her breast, the fluent contour of her waist and hips, under the fine black cloth of her dress—­all these, with the silence of