“Why give me just three days?”
“Pure impatience. Have you forgotten me?”
Their horses walked on with them. They unlocked their hands.
“You knew it was I?” said he.
“Who else could it be? I heard Venice,” she replied.
Her previous cavalier was on his feet, all but on his knees, it appeared, searching for something that eluded him under the road-side bank. He sprang at it and waved it, leapt in the saddle, and remarked, as he drew up beside Renée: “What one picks from the earth one may wear, I presume, especially when we can protest it is our property.”
Beauchamp saw him planting a white substance most carefully at the breast buttonhole of his coat. It could hardly be a flower. Some drooping exotic of the conservatory perhaps resembled it.
Renée pronounced his name: “M. le Comte Henri d’Henriel.”
He bowed to Beauchamp with an extreme sweep of the hat.
“Last night, M. Beauchamp, we put up vows for you to the Marine God, beseeching an exemption from that horrible mal de mer. Thanks to the storm, I suppose, I have won. I must maintain, madame, that I won.”