They walked cautiously through the park, for the moon was brilliant and outlined every object with startling vividness.

The trees here were sparser.

Close by was the sunk fence and the tiny rustic bridge--only a plank or two--which spanned it.
Some thirty yards ahead of them they could see the dark figure of Richard Lambert walking towards the house.
"One more stroll beneath the trees, _ma mie_," he said lightly, "you'll not wish to encounter your ardent suitor again." She loved him in this brighter mood, when he had thrown from him that mantle of jealousy and mistrust which of late had sat on him so ill.
He seemed to have set himself the task of pleasing her to-night--of making her forget, mayhap, the wooing of the several suitors who had hung round her to-day.

He talked to her--always in that mysterious, muffled voice, with the quaint rolling of the r's and the foreign intonation of the vowels--he talked to her of King Louis and his tyranny over the people of France: of his own political aims to which he had already sacrificed fortune, position, home.

Of his own brilliant past at the most luxurious court the world had ever known.