This was on the evening before the hunt; on that epochal brink of their first meeting. And on the next day all this talk became superfluous; as superfluous as for Falstaff to demand the time of day. II. A LEAD OF HEARTS. Mrs. Terwilliger Dehon--ah, Mrs. Dehon! Great heavens! why had they not met earlier--before she had sacrificed herself upon Terwilliger’s commonplace altars--before her radiant youth had been shrouded in tragedy? The Russo-French police may be successfully evaded, but not so the laws of society. Naught but misery could he see in store for them both--one long life-agony of divided souls. Of course, it took some time before this dismal prospect lay fairly out before them. At their first meeting there was nothing sadder in sight than the purple hills of Exmoor and the clear cascade of Bagworthy Water; and their talk was broken only by the cheerful yelp of hounds. And there had been fortune, too, in this; fortune we call fate, when fortune turns out ill. He had hardly seen her at the Cloudsham meet, and but just knew who she was. Thither he had gone with his friends, the Leighs, to see the red deer hunted in his ancient lair; and as he stood there, snuffing with his horse the sea-breeze that came up from Porlock Bay, immaculate in coat and patent-leathers, she had ridden up with a fat and pursy citizen beside her. This stall-fed citizen was horse-back on another square-built brute, and it was very Psychecide to call the wretch her husband. A Diana, by heaven! thought he; and, indeed, she sat her horse as any goddess might, and clothed her own riding-habit as the moon her covering of cloud. “Who’s that?” said he to Tom Leigh. “That’s the girl that married old Dehon,” said Tom. “She did it----” But when or how she did it Austin never knew, for just then there was a joyous baying from the hounds, and whish! they scampered downward, skirting hanging Cloudsham Wood. Unluckily, they were at the wrong end of the field, and before they reached the steep bit of gorsy moor that overlooks the valley everyone else who meant to ride had disappeared in the cover of the forest. She reined in her beautiful horse on the very brink, and looked up the valley over Oare Hill; May stood a few yards below and looked down the valley in the direction of Porlock. Then she looked down the valley to Porlock, and May looked up the valley to Oare Hill. And their eyes met.