It was seven o'clock--not early, according to French hours, for now and again the heavy wheels of a market cart, the jingling of the tiny bells hung on to the blue worsted-covered harness, the neighing of the horses, would break on his ear, and serve to remind him that he was in France--in the land where, if long tradition speaks truly, the thing that he was about to do would find many more honest apologists than in his own; in France which had given, close to this very spot, so magnificent a hospitality to his own Stuart ancestors. All about him lay the deep, mysterious, unbroken calm of the great forest; every trace of last summer's merrymakers--if, indeed, such people ever made their way to this, the further edge of the wooded peninsula,--had been completely obliterated. What more enchanting spot could be found in the wide world to form the setting of what he believed would be a life-long romance? Like most men, he had always seen something offensive, almost grotesque, in the preliminaries now usual to conventional marriage. Heavens! what a lack of imagination had the modern bride and bridegroom! Especially in England--especially in his own class. Here the mating birds, amid awakening spring, would sing his own and Barbara's epithalamium. And yet Berwick was not happy, as he had thought to be, to-day. Again and again during the long wakeful night he had just passed he had caught himself wondering whether his uncle, at the beginning of his long intimacy with Madame Sampiero, had felt such scruples as these which now tormented him. If so, they had soon vanished; Lord Bosworth, during many years, had been supremely content with life, and all that life brought him. Perhaps he, Berwick, was made of more scrupulous stuff. To-day he had to face the fact that in his cup of honey there was a drop of exceeding bitterness. The knowledge that Boringdon might be mistaken,--that Barbara might, after all, never be free,--made the matter scarcely more tolerable. Oliver had so spoken that at the time his words had carried conviction. Berwick asked himself why he had not told her the whole truth, and then let her be the judge as to what they should do. He had always been aware that there were the two streaks in his character--the two Stuart streaks--that of extreme nobility, and that which makes a man capable of acts of inexplicable betrayal. In vain he tried to persuade himself that now was too late to change. Human nature has its limits; in a few hours Barbara would be here, and with quickening pulses he tried to think only of the immediate future. Later on, there would--there must--come inevitable pain and difficulty; they would have to face the reproachful gaze of Madame Sampiero, the undoubted disapproval of Lord Bosworth, and yet whose example were he and Barbara now about to follow?