Steep and deep and sterile, under fields no plough can tame, Dip the cliffs full-fledged with poppies red as love or shame.
—Swinburne.
And it was in consequence of Monseigneur the Archbishop's advice, and of maman's desire that this advice be acted upon, that anon we see Master Legros, tailor-in-chief to His Majesty, the King of France, journeying with his daughter to England.
 
But this was chiefly, too, because of what Daniel Pye, the informer, had gone over to Paris to say. Nothing would take it out of Rose Marie's head that it was her duty now, if ever, to be loyal to the man who was still her husband in the sight of God. He could repudiate her—if His Holiness gave him leave—but two great wrongs could never make one simple right.
 
She, Rose Marie, had no dispensation to break the marriage vows of eighteen years ago. She had done no wrong to justify a dissolution of that marriage. Her husband was her husband; he was in danger of losing his honour and his life. She could at least give him timely warning.
 
If she failed in this, her duty, then indeed would she deserve the scorn of the world, the repudiation and the disgrace which pertains to the unfaithful wife.
 
On a beautiful sunny day early in October, Master Legros and his daughter first caught sight of the white cliffs of England gleaming beneath the kiss of the radiant sun. Rose Marie had sat silently, meditatively, in the prow[315] of the boat; she had gazed during the past few hours into that distant horizon whereon trembled a heat-laden mist. The titanic band of gilded atoms had long hidden from her view the shores of that mysterious country wherein he dwelt.
 
England to her meant the land where Michael Kestyon lived, and with aching eyes and throbbing heart she watched and watched, waiting for that first view when the mist would part and reveal to her the soil on which his foot was wont to tread. How starved was her heart that even that thought was a solace; the sensation of putting her foot down on the selfsame land whereon he dwelt was almost a consolation.
 
She gazed at the white cliffs like one anhungered, and as the slowly-moving boat drew nearer to this new land of promise, the sun slowly setting in the west changed with a touch of the fairy wand the white cliffs into gold.
 
She thought England beautiful both in the long twilight when mysterious veils of grey and mauve soften the outlines of the distant landscape, and in the glory of noon when tiny clouds chase one another across a sky of tender sapphire blue. She loved the early morning when every blade of grass on the crest of the cliffs at Dover was adorned by a tiny brilliant diamond, and she loved the midday sun which had drawn the breath of the dew until its soul had passed into delicate golden vapours.
 
She loved the quaintly-arrayed army of fruit trees in the orchards, the tender green of the lawns, the ruddy tints of early autumn which clothed the hillside with a brilliant mantle of gold. No! She could not believe that in this land of beauty, of peac............