For a mile back they had been treading my lady's land; they had only two more leagues to ride, and one of those was crumbling under each dogged footfall.

The salt flavour, which is new life to the shore-born, was in the fleecy reek which floated by them, now thinner, now more opaque; and almost they could hear the dull thunder of the Biscay waves falling on the rocks.
Tignonville looked back at her and smiled.

She caught the look; she fancied that she understood it and his thoughts.

But her own eyes were moist at the moment with tears, and what his said, and what there was of strangeness in his glance, half-warning, half-exultant, escaped her.

For there, not a mile before them, where the low hills about the fishing village began to rise from the dull inland level--hills green on the land side, bare and scarped towards the sea and the island--she espied the wayside chapel at which the nurse of her early childhood had told her beads.