ness! Now for friend Guillaume and the Countess!" His face
fell as he spoke. With the disappearance of excitement, and the
cessation of exertion, he realised again the great sorrow that faced
him and admitted of no evasion. He sighed deeply and sought his
cigarette-case. Vain hope of comfort! His cigarettes were no more
than a distasteful pulp. He felt forlorn, very cold, very hungry,
also; for it was now between nine and ten o'clock. His heart was heavy
as he prepared to mount the hill and finish his evening's work. He
must see Guillaume; he must see the Countess; and then--

"Ah!" he cried, and stooped suddenly to the ground. A bright object
lay plain and conspicuous on the road which had grown white again as it
dried in the sharp wind. It was an oval locket of gold, dropped there,
a few yards from the ford. It lay open--no doubt the jar of the fall
accounted for that--face downwards. The Captain picked it up and
examined it. He said nothing; his usual habit of soliloquy failed him
for the moment; he looked at it, then round at the landscape. For the
moonlight showed him a picture in the locket, and enabled him to make
out a written inscription under it.

"What?" breathed he at last. "Oh, I can't believe it!" He looked
again. "Oh, if that 's the lie of the land, my friend!" He smiled;
then, in an apparent revulsion of feeling, he frowned angrily, and even
shook his fist downstream, perhaps intending the gesture for some one
in the village. Lastly, he shook his head sadly, and set off up the
hill in the wake of the now vanished carriage; as he went, he whistled
in a soft and meditative way. But before he started, he had assured
himself that he in his turn had not dropped anything, and that M.
Guillaume's partially depleted portfolio was still safe in his pocket,
side by side with his own precious papers. And he deposited the locket
he had found with these other valued possessions.

A few minutes' walking brought him to the Cross. The exercise had
warmed him, the threatened stiffness of cold had passed; he ran lightly
up the hill and down into the basin. There was no sign of M.
Guillaume. The Captain, rather vexed, for he had business with that
gentleman,--an explanation of a matter which touched his own honour to
make, and an account which intimately concerned M. Guillaume to
adjust,--entered the hut. In an instant his hand was grasped in an
appealing grip, and the voice he loved best in the