‘How can you mope indoors on such an exquisite night?’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I feel as if I could send my shuttlecock up to the moon. Come out and be beaten! No; you are too wise. You know that I should win to-night.’ The little toy of cork and feathers quivered high up in the bright air; the slender, swaying figure bent back like a reed as the girl looked upward; the fair golden head moved with every motion of the battledore as the player bent or rose to anticipate the flying cork. She was glad to be out there alone. She was thinking of the unknown all the time. She could not get him out of her mind. She had a vague unreasonable idea that he must be near her; that he saw her as she played; that he was hiding somewhere in the shadow yonder, peeping over the wall; that he was in the moon—in the night—everywhere; that it was his breath which flattered those leaves trembling above the wall; that it was his footfall which she heard rustling among the shrubs—a stealthy, mysterious sound mingling with the plish-plash of the fountain in the next garden. She had talked lightly enough a little while ago of having seen the last of him: yet now, alone with her thoughts in the moonlit garden, it seemed as if this nameless stranger were interwoven with the fabric of her life, a part of her destiny for evermore. CHAPTER III. ‘AND VOLATILE, AS AY WAS HIS USAGE.’ Another brilliant summer day, a cloudless blue sky, a world steeped in sunshine. On the broad gravelled space in front of the palace-railings the heat and glare would have been too much for a salamander, and even Daphne, who belonged to the salamander species in so much as she had an infinite capacity for enjoying sunshine, blinked a little as she crossed the shelterless promenade, under her big tussore parasol, a delightfully cool-looking figure, in a plain white muslin gown, and a muslin shepherdess hat. Poor Miss Toby’s chronic headache had been a little worse this morning. Heroically had she striven to fulfil her duty, albeit to lift her leaden head from the pillow was absolute agony. She sat at the breakfast-table, white, ghastly, uncomplaining, pouring out coffee, at the very odour of which her bilious soul sickened. Vainly did Daphne entreat her to go back to bed, and to leave her charges to take care of themselves, as they had done yesterday. ‘We won’t go to the forest any more till you are able to go with us,’ said Daphne, dimly conscious that her behaviour in that woodland region had been open to blame. ‘We can just go quietly to the palace, and stroll through the rooms with the few tourists who are likely to be there to-day. The Fontainebleau season has hardly begun, don’t you know, and we may have nobody but the guide, and of course he must be a respectable person.’