“We can speed her up, now, eh, till we get to the bad road?”
“Yes, Captain.”
The auto lunged ahead at a fifty-mile clip. The macadam lay straight and level ahead of us. Here was the hamlet of La Garde, perched on its hill-top around its dilapidated castle. The train of thought was quite involuntary—but these ruins brought back to my memory a woman’s face—the face of Madeleine, Madeleine de ... I almost betrayed her name ... whom I had met just a year before in those self-same ruins.
The old walls stood out with their battlements cut clean against the darkening sky. The plain below was a naked, leprous tangle of stupid olive-trees.... But that day, I had crossed the courtyard of the castle; and, I remembered, behind the tower I had spied the slender, agile form of a woman. She was a sight-seer, probably, resting for a moment on the top step of the stairway leading to the old postern. My heels clacked on the pavement, and she looked around my way—a dazzling vision of greenish golden hair, with eyes of emerald.
Madeleine.... How endlessly, limitlessly far away all those days now seem! But they are so remotely past for me, alone. That woman is still alive ... still young ... still beautiful. Indeed it were indiscreet to give even the four syllables of her name. But there are so many Madeleines in the world—Madeleines even with hair of greenish gold and emerald eyes!
Still at fifty miles an hour we swept into and through the village of Farlède. A mile or two ahead the first houses of Solliès-Pont were coming into view.
I looked at my watch. Three thirty-nine! At three forty, to a second, we reached the turning where a road makes off from Solliès-Pont to Aiguiers and thence toward the Grand Cap. My orderly was waiting there, holding my horse playfully by the nose. We stopped so short that I struck hard against the wind-shield with my chest.
A moment later I was in the saddle.
Some women of the village sat looking at me with interest from their door-steps. They thought the speed of my arrival and the suddenness of my departure were a bit suspicious. I remember hearing one of them remark in a shrill Provençal dialect:
“Anyhow it’s not the kind of weather for a dress parade ... no girls are out!”