Renee’s brevity became luminous.  She needed him urgently, and knowing him faithful to the death, she, because she knew him, dispatched purely the words which said she needed him.  Why, those brief words were the poetry of noble confidence!  But what could her distress be?  The lover was able to read that, ‘Come; I give you three days,’ addressed to him, was not language of a woman free of her yoke.

Excited to guess and guess, Beauchamp swept on to speculations of a madness that seized him bodily at last.  Were you loved, Cecilia?  He thought little of politics in relation to Renee; or of home, or of honour in the world’s eye, or of labouring to pay the fee for his share of life.  This at least was one of the forms of love which precipitate men:  the sole thought in him was to be with her.  She was Renee, the girl of whom he had prophetically said that she must come to regrets and tears.  His vision of her was not at Tourdestelle, though he assumed her to be there awaiting him:  she was under the sea-shadowing Alps, looking up to the red and gold-rosed heights of a realm of morning that was hers inviolably, and under which Renee was eternally his.

The interval between then and now was but the space of an unquiet sea traversed in the night, sad in the passage of it, but featureless—­and it had proved him right!  It was to Nevil Beauchamp as if the spirit of his old passion woke up again to glorious hopeful morning when he stood in Renee’s France.

Tourdestelle enjoyed the aristocratic privilege of being twelve miles from the nearest railway station.  Alighting here on an evening of clear sky, Beauchamp found an English groom ready to dismount for him and bring on his portmanteau.  The man said that his mistress had been twice to the station, and was now at the neighbouring Chateau Dianet.  Thither Beauchamp betook himself on horseback.  He was informed at the gates that Madame la Marquise had left for Tourdestelle in the saddle only ten minutes previously.  The lodge-keeper had been instructed to invite him to stay at Chateau Dianet in the event of his arriving late, but it would be possible to overtake madame by a cut across the heights at a turn of the valley.  Beauchamp pushed along the valley for this visible projection; a towering mass of woodland, in the midst of which a narrow roadway, worn like the track of a torrent with heavy rain, wound upward.  On his descent to the farther side, he was to spy directly below in the flat for Tourdestelle.  He crossed the wooded neck above the valley, and began descending, peering into gulfs of the twilight dusk.  Some paces down he was aided by a brilliant half-moon that divided the whole underlying country into sharp outlines of dark and fair, and while endeavouring to distinguish the chateau of Tourdestelle his eyes were attracted to an angle of the downward zigzag, where a pair of horses emerged into broad light swiftly; apparently the riders were disputing, or one had overtaken the other in pursuit.  Riding-habit and plumed hat signalized the sex of one.  Beauchamp sung out a gondolier’s cry.  He fancied it was answered.