Not twenty yards from where they were, a low wall divided the park itself from the wood beyond, which extended down to Acol village. At an angle of the wall there was an iron gate, also the tumble-down pavilion, ivy-grown and desolate, with stone steps leading up to it, through the cracks of which weeds and moss sprouted up apace. A man had just emerged from out the thicket and was standing now to the farther side of the gate looking straight at Lambert and at Sue, who stood in the full light of the moon. A broad-brimmed hat, such as cavaliers affected, cast a dark shadow over his face. It was a mere outline only vaguely defined against the background of trees, but in that outline Lambert had already recognized the mysterious stranger who lodged in his brother's cottage down in Acol. The fixed intensity of the young man's gaze caused Sue to turn and to look in the same direction. She saw the stranger, who encountering two pairs of eyes fixed on him, raised his hat with a graceful flourish of the arm: then, with a short ironical laugh, went his way, and was once more lost in the gloom. The girl instinctively made a movement as if to follow him, whilst a quickly smothered cry--half of joy and half of fear--escaped her lips. She checked the movement as well as the cry, but not before Richard Lambert had perceived both. With the perception came the awful, overwhelming certitude. "That adventurer!" he exclaimed involuntarily. "Oh my God!" But she looked him full in the face, and threw back her head with a gesture of pride and of wrath. "Master Lambert," she said haughtily, "methinks 'twere needless to remind you that--since I inadvertently revealed my most cherished secret to you--it were unworthy a man of honor to betray it to any one." "My lady ... Sue," he said, feeling half-dazed, bruised and crushed by the terrible moral blow, which he had just received, "I ... I do not quite understand. Will you deign to explain?" "There is naught to explain," she retorted coldly. "Prince Amédé d'Orléans loves me and I have plighted my troth to him." "Nay! I entreat your ladyship," he said, feeling--knowing the while, how useless it was to make an appeal against the infatuation of a hot-headed and impulsive girl, yet speaking with the courage which ofttimes is born of despair, "I beg of you, on my knees to listen. This foreign adventurer ..." "Silence!" she retorted proudly, and drawing back from him, for of a truth he had sunk on his knees before her, "an you desire to be my friend, you must not breathe one word of slander against the man I love. ..." Then, as he said nothing, realizing, indeed, how futile would be any effort or word from him, she said, with growing enthusiasm, whilst her glowing eyes fixed themselves upon the gloom which had enveloped the mysterious apparition of her lover: