Strolling the next afternoon with his new acquaintances along the Digue, a few steps in front of them he saw a lady, plainly and darkly but most elegantly dressed leaning on the arm of a tall man.  They walked slowly, and were evidently lost in contemplation of the softly rolling sea.  At first he paid but little attention to the couple, and would not have noticed them at all had not the Digue been very empty of visitors just then.  But, strange to say, his gaze kept wandering from the oily surface of the sea, and the steamers and fishing-smacks plowing their way through it, to the slender figure of the lady, who looked small beside her tall companion; and there gradually dawned upon him a dim idea that that slight figure reminded him of somebody—­that he had seen those delicate contours, those graceful proportions, that light and gliding gait before.  Without hastening his steps he soon overtook them, and recognized at the first glance that it was Loulou.  She too turned her head involuntarily to look at the passing trio.  As she caught sight of Wilhelm a sudden pallor overspread her face, and with an unconscious movement of terror she dropped her companion’s arm.  Both stood stockstill, as if suddenly deprived of the power of motion, and gazed at one another wide-eyed.  The silent encounter only lasted a few seconds, but the play on both sides was so marked that it could not fail to excite the attention of the lookers-on.  Loulou’s attendant cavalier looked in surprise from her to him, and evidently thought the proceedings most extraordinary.  But before he had time to ask for an explanation, Wilhelm had turned on his heel and was walking rapidly back to the hotel.  The two Americans followed him in silence.  Nothing in the scene had escaped them, but as true Anglo-Saxons they had too much native reserve to ask for a confidence which was not offered them.

Wilhelm was most painfully affected by the encounter, and not for worlds would he risk the possibility of meeting again with the unfortunate woman and the man to whom she now was bound in sinful union.  That same day he took leave of his Americans, and left Ostend early the next morning; at once fearful and relieved, as though fleeing successfully from the scene of a dark deed of his own committing.

After a long and tiresome journey, not made pleasanter by having to change four or five times, he arrived late in the evening at Eu, where he spent the night.  The next morning, an hour’s drive in a hotel omnibus brought him to Ault, a small market-town in the department of Somme, which the Americans had recommended to him as the quietest, cheapest, most unpretending, and at the same time picturesquely situated of any of the seaside places on the north coast of France, at least as far as Dieppe.