Read "The Line of Love" by James Branch Cabell online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
They rode leisurely enough along the winding highway that lay in the moonlight like a white ribbon in a peddler's box; and staying as I did some hundred yards behind, they thought me no other than Blaise, being, indeed, too much engrossed with each other to regard the outer world very strictly. So we rode a matter of three miles in the whispering, moonlit woods, they prattling and laughing as though there were no such monster in all the universe as a thrifty-minded father, and I brooding upon many things beside my marquisate, and keeping an ear cocked backward for possible pursuit.
In any ordinary falling out of affairs they would ride unhindered to Teignmouth, and thence to Allonby Shaw; they counted fully upon doing this; but I, knowing Beatris, who was waiting-maid to the Lady Adeliza, and consequently in the plot, to be the devil's own vixen, despite an innocent face and a wheedling tongue, was less certain.