ered with meagre foliage, all turning away
from the North, with their branches looking in the semi-darkness, like
stiff, ghostly hair, blown by a perpetual wind.

Fortunately, the moon showed no desire to peep between the clouds, and
Marguerite hugging the edge of the road, and keeping close to the low
line of shrubs, was fairly safe from view. Everything around her was so
still: only from far, very far away, there came like a long soft moan,
the sound of the distant sea.

The air was keen and full of brine; after that enforced period of
inactivity, inside the evil-smelling, squalid inn, Marguerite would
have enjoyed the sweet scent of this autumnal night, and the distant
melancholy rumble of the autumnal night, and the distant melancholy
rumble of the waves; she would have revelled in the calm and stillness
of this lonely spot, a calm, broken only at intervals by the strident
and mournful cry of some distant gull, and by the creaking of
the wheels, some way down the road: she would have loved the cool
atmosphere, the peaceful immensity of Nature, in this lonely part of the
coast: but her heart was too full of cruel foreboding, of a great ache
and longing for a being who had become infinitely dear to her.

Her feet slipped on the grassy bank, for she thought it safest not to
walk near the centre of the road, and she found it difficult to keep up
a sharp pace along the muddy incline. She even thought it best not to
keep too near to the cart; everything was so still, that the rumble of
the wheels could not fail to be a safe guide.

The loneliness was absolute. Already the few dim lights of Calais lay
far behind, and on this road there was not a sign of human habitation,
not even the hut of a fisherman or of a woodcutter anywhere near; far
away on her right was the edge of the cliff, below it the rough beach,
against which the incoming tide was dashing itself with its constant,
distant murmur. And ahead the rumble of the wheels, bearing an
implacable enemy to his triumph.

Marguerite wondered at what particular spot, on this lonely coast, Percy
could be at this moment. Not very far surely, for he had had less than a
quarter of an hour's start of Chauvelin. She wondered if he knew that
in this cool, ocean-scented bit of France, there lurked many spies, all
eager to sight his tall figure, to track him to where his unsuspecting
friends waited for him, and then, to close the net over him and them.

Chauvelin, on ahead, j