me as water. Even her colour little by little left her cheeks.
She knew that he had only to look at her now to read the truth; that it
was written in her face, in her shrinking figure, in the eyes which now
guiltily sought and now avoided his. And feeling sure that he did read
it and know it, she fancied that he licked his lips, as the cat which
plays with the mouse; she fancied that he gloated on her terror and her
perplexity.

This, though the day and the road were warrants for all cheerful
thoughts. On one side vineyards clothed the warm red slopes, and rose in
steps from the valley to the white buildings of a convent. On the other
the stream wound through green flats where the black cattle stood knee-
deep in grass, watched by wild-eyed and half-naked youths. Again the
travellers lost sight of the Loir, and crossing a shoulder, rode through
the dim aisles of a beech-forest, through deep rustling drifts of last
year's leaves. And out again and down again they passed, and turning
aside from the gateway, trailed along beneath the brown machicolated wall
of an old town, from the crumbling battlements of which faces
half-sleepy, half-suspicious, watched them as they moved below through
the glare and heat. Down to the river-level again, where a squalid
anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them,
and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the
hour of Nones.

And still he said nothing, and she, cowed by his mysterious gaiety, yet
spurning herself for her cowardice, was silent also. He hoped to arrive
at Angers before nightfall. What, she wondered, shivering, would happen
there? What was he planning to do to her? How would he punish her?
Brave as she was, she was a woman, with a woman's nerves; and fear and
anticipation got upon them; and his silence--his silence which must mean
a thing worse than words!

And then on a sudden, piercing all, a new thought. Was it possible that
he had other letters? If his bearing were consistent with anything, it
was consistent with that. Had he other genuine letters, or had he
duplicate letters, so that he had lost nothing, but instead had gained
the right to rack and torture her, to taunt and despise her?

That thought stung her into sudden self-betrayal. They were riding along
a broad dusty track which bordered a stone causey raised above the level
of winter floods. Impulsively she turned to him.

"You have other l