While uttering these simple words, the voice of Moras became hesitating; a damp cloud obscured his eyes.

“Where can she be going at this hour?” he resumed with his usual firmness of speech.

“I do not know; merely some new fancy, I suppose.  At any rate, she has seemed to me lately more strange, more moody, and I feel uneasy.  Let us try and follow her, if you like.”

“Let us go, my friend,” said the count after a pause of singular hesitation.

They both left the chateau together, taking their fowling-pieces with them, in order to induce the belief that they were going, according to a quite frequent habit, to shoot sea-birds.  At the moment of selecting a direction, Monsieur de Moras turned to Lucan with an inquiring glance.

“I see no danger,” said Lucan, “save in the direction of the cliffs.  A few words that escaped her yesterday lead me to fear that the peril may be there; but with her horse, she is compelled to make a long detour.  By cutting across the woods, we’ll be there ahead of her.”

They entered the timber to the west of the chateau, and walked in silence and with rapid steps.

The path they had taken led them directly to the plateau overlooking the cliffs they had visited the previous day.  The woods extended in that direction in an irregular triangle, the last trees of which almost touched the very brink of the cliff.

As they were approaching with feverish steps that extreme point, Lucan suddenly stopped.

“Listen!” he said.

The sound of a horse’s gallop upon the hard soil could be distinctly heard.  They ran.

A sloping bank of moderate elevation divided the wood from the plateau.  This they climbed half way with the help of trailing branches; screened then by the bushes and the foliage, they beheld before them a most impressive spectacle.  At a short distance to the left, Julia was coming on at break-neck speed; she was following the oblique line of the woods, apparently shaping her course straight toward the edge of the cliff.  They thought at first that her horse had run away, but they saw that she was lashing him with her whip to further accelerate his speed.

She was still some hundred paces from the two men, and she was about passing before them.  Lucan was preparing to leap to the other side of the bank, when the hand of Monsieur de Moras fell violently upon his arm and held him back—­firmly.

They looked at each other.  Lucan was amazed at the profound alteration that had suddenly contracted the count’s features and sunken his eyes; he read at the same time in his fixed gaze an immense sorrow, but also an immovable resolve.  He understood that there was no longer any secret between them.  He yielded to that glance, which, so far as he was concerned—­he felt sure of that—­conveyed nothing but an expression of confidence and friendly supplication.  He grasped his friend’s hand within his own and remained motionless.  The horse shot by within a few steps of them, his flanks white with foam, while Julia, beautiful, graceful, and charming still in that terrible moment, sat lightly upon the saddle.