hem as close as the
shroud. She walked fast, but scarcely felt that she was moving. Near
midday the haunted circle widened; rocks were loosely folded in it, and
heads of trees, whose round intervolving roots grasped the yellow
roadside soil; the mists shook like a curtain, and partly opened and
displayed a tapestry-landscape, roughly worked, of woollen crag and
castle and suggested glen, threaded waters, very prominent foreground,
Autumn flowers on banks; a predominant atmospheric greyness. The sun
threw a shaft, liquid instead of burning, as we see his beams beneath a
wave; and then the mists narrowed again, boiled up the valleys and
streams above the mountain, curled and flew, and were Python coils
pierced by brighter arrows of the sun. A spot of blue signalled his
victory above.

To look at it was to fancy they had been walking under water and had now
risen to the surface. Carinthia's mind stepped out of the chamber of
death. The different air and scene breathed into her a timid warmth
toward the future, and between her naming of the lesser mountains on
their side of the pass, she asked questions relating to England, and
especially the ladies she was to see at the Baths beyond the
glacier-pass. She had heard of a party of his friends awaiting him there,
without much encouragement from him to ask particulars of them, and she
had hitherto abstained, as she was rather shy of meeting her
countrywomen. The ladies, Chillon said, were cousins; one was a young
widow, the Countess of Fleetwood, and the other was Miss Fakenham, a
younger lady.

Carinthia murmured in German: 'Poor soul!' Which one was she pitying? The
widow, she said, in the tone implying, naturally.

Her brother assured her the widow was used to it, for this was her second
widowhood.

'She marries again!' exclaimed the girl.

'You don't like that idea?' said he.

Carinthia betrayed a delicate shudder.

Her brother laughed to himself at her expressive present tense. 'And
marries again!' he said. 'There will certainly be a third.'

'Husband?' said she, as at the incredible.

'Husband, let's hope,' he answered.

She dropped from her contemplation of the lady, and her look at her
brother signified: It will not be you!

Chillon was engaged in spying for a place where he could spread out the
contents of his bag. Sharp hunger beset them both at the mention of
eating. A bank of sloping green shaded by a chestnut proposed the seat,
and here he relieved t