e second tower,
only three foot-passengers could be seen. These were a child, a man, and
a woman. Walking at a distance from each other, these wayfarers had no
visible connection. The child, a boy of about eight years old, had
stopped, and was looking curiously at the wintry scene. The man walked
behind the woman, at a distance of about a hundred paces. Like her he
was coming from the direction of the church of St. Sampson. The
appearance of the man, who was still young, was something between that
of a workman and a sailor. He wore his working-day clothes--a kind of
Guernsey shirt of coarse brown stuff, and trousers partly concealed by
tarpaulin leggings--a costume which seemed to indicate that,
notwithstanding the holy day, he was going to no place of worship. His
heavy shoes of rough leather, with their soles covered with large
nails, left upon the snow, as he walked, a print more like that of a
prison lock than the foot of a man. The woman, on the contrary, was
evidently dressed for church. She wore a large mantle of black silk,
wadded, under which she had coquettishly adjusted a dress of Irish
poplin, trimmed alternately with white and pink; but for her red
stockings, she might have been taken for a Parisian. She walked on with
a light and free step, so little suggestive of the burden of life that
it might easily be seen that she was young. Her movements possessed that
subtle grace which indicates the most delicate of all transitions--that
soft intermingling, as it were, of two twilights--the passage from the
condition of a child to that of womanhood. The man seemed to take no
heed of her.

Suddenly, near a group of oaks at the corner of a field, and at the spot
called the Basses Maisons, she turned, and the movement seemed to
attract the attention of the man. She stopped, seemed to reflect a
moment, then stooped, and the man fancied that he could discern that she
was tracing with her finger some letters in the snow. Then she rose
again, went on her way at a quicker pace, turned once more, this time
smiling, and disappeared to the left of the roadway, by the footpath
under the hedges which leads to the Ivy Castle. When she had turned for
the second time, the man had recognised her as Deruchette, a charming
girl of that neighbourhood.

The man felt no need of quickening his pace; and some minutes later he
found himself near the group of oaks. Already he had ceased to think of
the vanished Deruchette; and if, at tha