ight come and shake a rain of rose-leaves from
the laden branches, and whirl them after the departing page.

MRS. FONSS

In the graceful pleasure-gardens behind the Pope's ancient palace
in Avignon stands a bench from which one can overlook the Rhone, the
flowery banks of the Durance, hills and fields, and a part of the town.

One October afternoon two Danish ladies were seated on this bench, Mrs.
Fonss, a widow, and her daughter Elinor.

Although they had been here several days and were already familiar with
the view before them, they nevertheless sat there and marveled that this
was the way the Provence looked.

And this really was the Provence! A clayey river with flakes of muddy
sand, and endless shores of stone-gray gravel; pale-brown fields without
a blade of grass, pale-brown slopes, pale-brown hills and dust-colored
roads, and here and there near the white houses, groups of black trees,
absolutely black bushes and trees. Over all this hung a whitish sky,
quivering with light, which made everything still paler, still dryer and
more wearily light; never a glimmer of luxuriant, satiated hues, nothing
but hungry, sun-parched colors; not a sound in the air, not a scythe
passing through the grass, not a wagon rattling over the roads; and the
town stretching out on both sides was also as if built of silence with
all the streets still as at noon time, with all the houses deaf and
dumb, every shutter closed, every blind drawn, each and every one;
houses that could neither see nor hear.

Mrs. Fonss viewed this lifeless monotony with a resigned smile, but
it made Elinor visibly nervous; not actively nervous as in the case of
annoyance, but mournful and weary, as one often becomes after many days
of rain, when all one's gloomy thoughts seem to pour down upon one with
the rain; or as at the idiotically consoling tick-tack of a clock, when
one sits and grows incurably tired of one's self; or at watching the
flowers of the wall-paper, when the same chain of worn-out dreams clanks
about against one's will in the brain and the links are joined and come
apart and in a stifling endlessness are united again. It actually had a
physical effect upon her, this landscape, almost causing her to faint.
To-day everything seemed to have conspired with the memories of a
hope which was dead and of sweet and lively dreams which had become
disagreeable and nauseous; dreams which caused her to redden when she
thought of them and wh