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.

He was heard, for the lady turned about, and as he rode down, still uncertain of her, she came cantering up alone, and there could be no uncertainty.

Moonlight is friendless to eyes that would make sure of a face long unseen.  It was Renee whose hand he clasped, but the story of the years on her, and whether she was in bloom, or wan as the beams revealing her, he could not see.

Her tongue sounded to him as if it were loosened without a voice.  ’You have come.  That storm!  You are safe!’

So phantom-like a sound of speech alarmed him.  ‘I lost no time.  But you?’

‘I am well.’

‘Nothing hangs over you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why give me just three days?’

‘Pure impatience.  Have you forgotten me?’

Their horses walked on with them.  They unlocked their hands.

‘You knew it was I?’ said he.

‘Who else could it be?  I heard Venice,’ she replied.

Her previous cavalier was on his feet, all but on his knees, it appeared, searching for something that eluded him under the road-side bank.  He sprang at it and waved it, leapt in the saddle, and remarked, as he drew up beside Renee:  ’What one picks from the earth one may wear, I presume, especially when we can protest it is our property.’