"Got enough cash for the license?" asked Byram, uneasily.

"Plenty, governor; don't worry. Speed, don't let him mope. We'll be
in Lorient this time to-morrow," I called back, with a swagger of
assumed cheerfulness.

Speed stepped swiftly across the square and laid his hand on my
stirrup.

"What are you going to do if you see Buckhurst?"

"Nothing."

"Or the Countess?"

"I don't know."

"I suppose you will go out of your way to find her if she's in
Paradise?"

"Yes."

"And tell her the truth about Buckhurst?"

"I expect to."

After a moment's silence he said: "Don't do anything until I see you
to-night, will you?"

"All right," I replied, and set my horse at a gallop over the old
stone bridge.

The highway to the sea which winds down through acres of yellow gorse
and waving broom to the cliffs of Paradise is a breezy road, swept by
the sweet winds that blow across Brittany from the Cote d'Or to the
Pyrenees.

It is a land of sea-winds; and when in the still noontide of midsummer
the winds are at play far out at sea, their traces remain in the
furrowed wheat, in the incline of solitary trees, in the breezy trend
of the cliff-clover and the blackthorn and the league-wide sweep of
the moorlands.

And through this land whose inland perfume always savored the unseen
sea I rode down to Paradise.

It was not until I had galloped through the golden forest of Kerselec
that I came in sight of the ocean, although among the sunbeams and the
dropping showers of yellow beech-leaves I fancied I could hear the
sound of the surf.

And now I rode slowly, in full sight of the sea where it lay, an
immense gray band across the world, touching a looming horizon, and in
throat and nostril the salt stung sweetly, and the whole world seemed
younger for the breath of the sea.

From the purple mystery of the horizon to the landward cliffs the
ocean appeared motionless; it was only when I had advanced almost to
the cliffs that I saw the movement of waves--that I perceived the
contrast between inland inertia and the restless repose of the sea,
stirring ceaselessly since creation.

The same little sparkling river I had crossed in Quimperle I now saw
again, spreading out a wide, flat current which broke into waves where
it tumbled seaward across the bar; I heard the white-winged gulls
mewing, the thunderous monotone of the surf, and a bell in some unseen
chapel ringing sweetly.

I passed a stone house, another; then the