The Blanket of the Dark by John Buchan

Sleep banished the dregs of Peter's ill-temper. The sky had cleared after the rain, and he set out on his journey in a world all blue and golden. Master Plummer, too, made an early start, and to his surprise Peter found that Simon Rede had made a still earlier one, having left before dawn for Gloucester to prepare the way for the other's reception. The sour-faced commissary was therefore a witness, as Lord Avelard had intended, to the zeal of the house on the Church's errands. The Bishop's four servants wore sad-coloured liveries with a cross on their shoulders, but the two Avelard men were splendid in Avelard's yellow and black. As they started uphill towards the crest of Cotswold the Severn vale swam in a clear morning light, and the far hills rose blue and wraith- like against the pale sky. Every thicket was a riot of autumn gold and crimson, the pools left by the rain were alive with wild-fowl, and a great wedge of geese was winging across the valley. Peter drew long breaths of the sharp, scented air. In such a world it was good to be alive.

His heart had lightened as a boy's will at the coming of a new pleasure, and his head was filled with two pictures. One was Sabine, as he had seen her that night when he had revealed his knowledge of the Painted Floor, and her arms had opened towards him. Fool that he had been not to accept his fortune! A malediction on Sir Gabriel for his inopportune awakening! She had invited him to a deeper intimacy, since they two were sharers in one secret. She had invited him before. He remembered her appealing music on his first night at Avelard, and the night when they had supped together and her eyes had been like a siren's. Now he saw these incidents in a different light, and he recalled Lord Avelard's words the evening before. He was the unicorn who, according to the tale, could only be captured by the wiles of a virgin's lap. This girl was destined for him, was his for the taking -- and she was not unwilling. A delicious tremor shook him; he exulted, yet with fear. What mattered Simon Rede when her heart was his? He told himself that he had already conquered. And then another picture took the stage in his brain, inspired by the quick movement and the jingle of harness in the diamond morning. He saw himself riding at the head of an immense concourse -- all England -- with the swan of Bohun above him. The picture fairly ravished him. What, forsooth, mattered Simon Rede to one born to such a fortune?