pansion.

Well, this evening, as on every other evening, we awaited the appearance
of strange faces.

Only two appeared, but they were very remarkable, a man and a woman
--father and daughter. They immediately reminded me of some of Edgar
Poe's characters; and yet there was about them a charm, the charm
associated with misfortune. I looked upon them as the victims of fate.
The man was very tall and thin, rather stooped, with perfectly white
hair, too white for his comparatively youthful physiognomy; and there was
in his bearing and in his person that austerity peculiar to Protestants.
The daughter, who was probably twenty-four or twenty-five, was small in
stature, and was also very thin, very pale, and she had the air of one
who was worn out with utter lassitude. We meet people like this from time
to time, who seem too weak for the tasks and the needs of daily life, too
weak to move about, to walk, to do all that we do every day. She was
rather pretty; with a transparent, spiritual beauty. And she ate with
extreme slowness, as if she were almost incapable of moving her arms.

It must have been she, assuredly, who had come to take the waters.

They sat facing me, on the opposite side of the table; and I at once
noticed that the father had a very singular, nervous twitching.

Every time he wanted to reach an object, his hand described a sort of
zigzag before it succeeded in reaching what it was in search of, and
after a little while this movement annoyed me so that I turned aside my
head in order not to see it.

I noticed, too, that the young girl, during meals, wore a glove on her
left hand.

After dinner I went for a stroll in the park of the bathing
establishment. This led toward the little Auvergnese station of
Chatel-Guyon, hidden in a gorge at the foot of the high mountain, from
which flowed so many boiling springs, arising from the deep bed of
extinct volcanoes. Over yonder, above our heads, the domes of extinct
craters lifted their ragged peaks above the rest in the long mountain
chain. For Chatel-Guyon is situated at the entrance to the land of
mountain domes.

Beyond it stretches out the region of peaks, and, farther on again the
region of precipitous summits.

The "Puy de Dome" is the highest of the domes, the Peak of Sancy is the
loftiest of the peaks, and Cantal is the most precipitous of these
mountain heights.

It was a very warm evening, and I was walking up and down a shady path,
listening to