Next day Mademoiselle de Fontaine expressed a wish to take a ride.
Then she gradually accustomed her old uncle and her brothers to
escorting her in very early rides, excellent, she declared for her
health. She had a particular fancy for the environs of the hamlet
where Lady Dudley was living. Notwithstanding her cavalry manoeuvres,
she did not meet the stranger so soon as the eager search she pursued
might have allowed her to hope. She went several times to the "Bal de
Sceaux" without seeing the young Englishman who had dropped from the
skies to pervade and beautify her dreams. Though nothing spurs on a
young girl's infant passion so effectually as an obstacle, there was a
time when Mademoiselle de Fontaine was on the point of giving up her
strange and secret search, almost despairing of the success of an
enterprise whose singularity may give some idea of the boldness of her
temper. In point of fact, she might have wandered long about the
village of Chatenay without meeting her Unknown. The fair Clara--since
that was the name Emilie had overheard--was not English, and the
stranger who escorted her did not dwell among the flowery and fragrant
bowers of Chatenay.

One evening Emilie, out riding with her uncle, who, during the fine
weather, had gained a fairly long truce from the gout, met Lady
Dudley. The distinguished foreigner had with her in her open carriage
Monsieur Vandenesse. Emilie recognized the handsome couple, and her
suppositions were at once dissipated like a dream. Annoyed, as any
woman must be whose expectations are frustrated, she touched up her
horse so suddenly that her uncle had the greatest difficulty in
following her, she had set off at such a pace.

"I am too old, it would seem, to understand these youthful spirits,"
said the old sailor to himself as he put his horse to a canter; "or