At twilight Adeline kneels in prayer, slips down the winding stair and takes the path Peter showed her to the old tomb. Horses and the Marquis's voice come towards her through the dark, and she stands frozen between him and La Motte until the sounds wheel away towards the abbey. She hides in the cell and waits more than half an hour, until three strokes of a whip sound above the grate. She climbs out, calls for Peter, is told to hush, and rides off at a gallop with a man she cannot see. When she asks what happened at the abbey and begs him to speak louder, she hears that the voice is not Peter's. The stranger says he is taking her where his master ordered and ties her to the horse when she tries to jump. After a storm and two more hours of riding they reach a high wall, a small door and a passage that opens into a saloon.
The saloon is lit by a silver lamp and painted with scenes from Ovid, with fruit and ices laid out, and every window and door in it is fastened. Music begins, and a woman sings that life is a bright illusion and that she should catch the pleasures ere they fade. The Marquis walks in and Adeline faints, twice. Two young women revive her and tell her it will be her own fault if she is unhappy, so she had better look happy for him. The Marquis begs pardon for a step that love prompted and begins to repeat his honourable terms, then sees the contempt in her face and knows his plan is found out. He presses on all the same. Adeline, who has never practised deceit, decides her only chance lies in delay, and she pretends not to know that the Marchioness is alive. She tells him he must first deserve her esteem by letting her go. He answers that every pleasure within these walls is hers but beyond them she shall not go, and that a priest will marry them tomorrow.
Songs and a distant horn follow, and when he tries to embrace her she awes him with a look of dignity. She says she is exhausted, and he withdraws, telling her to remember tomorrow. In her silk-hung bedroom the windows are fastened, but a dressing-closet has one that opens, and it is low enough to jump from. She drops into a large garden and wanders along a lake looking for the wall, and instead finds the Marquis, flushed with wine, through the window of a bower. She runs, and a figure pursues her through the grounds until she sinks senseless.
She wakes in the arms of Theodore, who tells her to fear nothing. Joy mixes with mistrust, because he vanished when she most needed him and is the Marquis's friend. He leads her to the wall, holds the ladder while she climbs, wakes the sleeping postillion and drives her off in a carriage. On the road he explains. The Marquis, his colonel, ordered him to his regiment after the forest meeting was reported, which Adeline guesses came from La Motte. The Marquis's servant Jaques kept him informed, and he slipped away from the regiment in secret to learn of the plot for that night. He says his act was love and promises not to press the point until she is free to accept or refuse. Adeline asks if he thinks her ungrateful, and he presses her hand to his lips without a word as they ride on for miles in silence.
Coming Up in Chapter 12
Dawn finds the carriage changing horses at a small town, and Theodore at last lets himself hope. Then the postillion points to horsemen on the hill road. At a village inn, soldiers arrest Theodore in the king's name for leaving his regiment, and a sabre blow to the head follows.
