Dacier butted against the stringing wind, that kept him at a rocking incline to his left for a mile.  He then discerned in what had seemed a dredger’s dot on the sands, a lady’s figure, unmistakably she, without the corroborating testimony of Leander paw-deep in the low-tide water.  She was out at a distance on the ebb-sands, hurtled, gyred, beaten to all shapes, in rolls, twists, volumes, like a blown banner-flag, by the pressing wind.  A kerchief tied her bonnet under her chin.  Bonnet and breast-ribands rattled rapidly as drummer-sticks.  She stood near the little running ripple of the flat sea-water, as it hurried from a long streaked back to a tiny imitation of spray.  When she turned to the shore she saw him advancing, but did not recognize; when they met she merely looked with wide parted lips.  This was no appointment.

‘I had to see you,’ Dacier said.

She coloured to a deeper red than the rose-conjuring wind had whipped in her cheeks.  Her quick intuition of the reason of his coming barred a mental evasion, and she had no thought of asking either him or herself what special urgency had brought him.

‘I have been here four days.’

‘Lady Esquart spoke of the place.’

‘Lady Esquart should not have betrayed me.’

‘She did it inadvertently, without an idea of my profiting by it.’

Diana indicated the scene in a glance.  ‘Dreary country, do you think?’

’Anywhere!’—­said he.

They walked up the sand-heap.  The roaring Easter with its shrieks and whistles at her ribands was not favourable to speech.  His ‘Anywhere!’ had a penetrating significance, the fuller for the break that left it vague.

Speech between them was commanded; he could not be suffered to remain.  She descended upon a sheltered pathway running along a ditch, the border of pastures where cattle cropped, raised heads, and resumed their one comforting occupation.

Diana gazed on them, smarting from the buffets of the wind she had met.

‘No play of their tails to-day’; she said, as she slackened her steps.  ‘You left Lady Esquart well?’

’Lady Esquart . . .  I think was well.  I had to see you.  I thought you would be with her in Berkshire.  She told me of a little sea-side place close to Caen.’

‘You had to see me?’

‘I miss you now if it’s a day!’

‘I heard a story in London . . .’

’In London there are many stories.  I heard one.  Is there a foundation for it?’

‘No.’

He breathed relieved.  ’I wanted to see you once before . . . if it was true.  It would have made a change in my life-a gap.’

‘You do me the honour to like my Sunday evenings?’

‘Beyond everything London can offer.’

‘A letter would have reached me.’

‘I should have had to wait for the answer.  There is no truth in it?’

Her choice was to treat the direct assailant frankly or imperil her defence by the ordinary feminine evolutions, which might be taken for inviting:  poor pranks always.