Madame knew I loved her. She must have seen the hunger in my eyes, as I watched her come and go, in the days when I lay at Ste. Genevieve, wounded to death. She must have felt the words I crushed down, I know not how, when we parted. She knew it all. Every woman knows how a man stands towards her. I was going away. I might never see her again. It was little to have waved me Godspeed as I rode on my way, and yet that little was not given. In this manner, like the fool I was, I rasped and fretted, easing my unhappy temper by letting the horse feel the rowels, and swearing at myself for a whining infant that wept for a slice of the moon. For a league or so we galloped along the undulating ground which sloped towards the ford near Ezy; but as we began to approach the river, the country, studded with apple orchards, and trim with hedgerows of holly and hawthorn, broke into a wild and rugged moorland, intersected by ravines, whose depths were concealed by a tall undergrowth of Christ's Thorn and hornbeam, whilst beyond this, in russet, in sombre greens, and greys that faded into absolute blue, stretched the forests and woods of Anet and Croth-Sorel. In the flood of the mellow sunlight the countless bells of heather enamelling the roadside were clothed in royal purple, and the brown tips of the bracken glistened like shafts of beaten gold. At times the track took its course over the edge of a steep bank, and here we slackened pace, picking our way over the crumbling earth, covered with grass, whose growth was choked by a network of twining cranesbill, gay with its crimson flowers, and listening to the dreamy humming of the restless bees, and the cheerful, if insistent, skirl of the grass crickets, from their snug retreats amidst the yarrow and sweet-scented thyme. As we slid rather than rode down one of these banks, my horse cast a shoe, and this put a stop to any further hard riding until the mishap could be repaired. 'There is a smith at Ezy, monsieur,' said Jacques, 'where we can get what we want done, and then push on to Rouvres, where there is good accommodation at the _Grand Cerf_.' 'I suppose Ezy can give us nothing in that way?' 'I doubt much, monsieur, for the place sank to nothing when Monseigneur the Duc d'Aumale was exiled, and the King, as monsieur is aware, has given the castle to Madame Gabrielle, for her son, little _Cesar Monsieur_--the Duc de Vendome.' '_Morbleu!_ It is well that Madame de Beaufort has not set eyes on Auriac--eh, Jacques?' and I laughed as I saw the huge grey outlines of Anet rising in the foreground, and thought how secure my barren, stormbeaten rock was from the rapacity of the King's mistress. Jacques came of a rugged race, and my words roused him. 'But M. le Chevalier would never let Auriac fall into the hands of the King or his Madame? We could man the tower with a hundred stout hearts and----'