hen entered
with the Bourbon.

XXIV. THE MOONLIGHT RIDE

And so the twenty minutes' law passed into an infinity. We leave the
wicked Bechamel clothing himself with cursing as with a garment,--the
wretched creature has already sufficiently sullied our modest but
truthful pages,--we leave the eager little group in the bar of the
Vicuna Hotel, we leave all Bognor as we have left all Chichester and
Midhurst and Haslemere and Guildford and Ripley and Putney, and follow
this dear fool of a Hoopdriver of ours and his Young Lady in Grey out
upon the moonlight road. How they rode! How their hearts beat together
and their breath came fast, and how every shadow was anticipation and
every noise pursuit! For all that flight Mr. Hoopdriver was in the world
of Romance. Had a policeman intervened because their lamps were not lit,
Hoopdriver had cut him down and ridden on, after the fashion of a hero
born. Had Bechamel arisen in the way with rapiers for a duel, Hoopdriver
had fought as one to whom Agincourt was a reality and drapery a dream.
It was Rescue, Elopement, Glory! And she by the side of him! He had seen
her face in shadow, with the morning sunlight tangled in her hair, he
had seen her sympathetic with that warm light in her face, he had seen
her troubled and her eyes bright with tears. But what light is there
lighting a face like hers, to compare with the soft glamour of the
midsummer moon?

The road turned northward, going round through the outskirts of Bognor,
in one place dark and heavy under a thick growth of trees, then amidst
villas again, some warm and lamplit, some white and sleeping in the
moonlight; then between hedges, over which they saw broad wan meadows
shrouded in a low-lying mist. They scarcely heeded whither they rode at
first, being only anxious to get away, turning once westward when the
spire of Chichester cathedral rose suddenly near them out of the dewy
night, pale and intricate and high. They rode, speaking little, just a
rare word now and then, at a turning, at a footfall, at a roughness in
the road.

She seemed to be too intent upon escape to give much thought to him,
but after the first tumult of the adventure, as flight passed into mere
steady ridin@@ his mind became an enormous appreciation of the position.
The night was a warm white silence save for the subtile running of their
chains. He looked sideways at her as she sat beside him with her ankles
gracefully ruling the treadles. Now the