and vehicles going to
and fro as if they had plenty of time, was visible to Charlotte in her
chair; but Paula from her horizontal position could see nothing below
the level of the many dormered house-tops on the opposite side of the
Platz. After watching this upper storey of the city for some time in
silence, she asked Charlotte to hand her a binocular lying on the table,
through which instrument she quietly regarded the distant roofs.

'What strange and philosophical creatures storks are,' she said. 'They
give a taciturn, ghostly character to the whole town.'

The birds were crossing and recrossing the field of the glass in their
flight hither and thither between the Strassburg chimneys, their sad
grey forms sharply outlined against the sky, and their skinny legs
showing beneath like the limbs of dead martyrs in Crivelli's emaciated
imaginings. The indifference of these birds to all that was going on
beneath them impressed her: to harmonize with their solemn and silent
movements the houses beneath should have been deserted, and grass
growing in the streets.

Behind the long roofs thus visible to Paula over the window-sill,
with their tiers of dormer-windows, rose the cathedral spire in
airy openwork, forming the highest object in the scene; it suggested
something which for a long time she appeared unwilling to utter; but
natural instinct had its way.

'A place like this,' she said, 'where he can study Gothic architecture,
would, I should have thought, be a spot more congenial to him than
Monaco.'

The person referred to was the misrepresented Somerset, whom the two had
been gingerly discussing from time to time, allowing any casual subject,
such as that of the storks, to interrupt the personal one at every two
or three sentences.

'It would be more like him to be here,' replied Miss De Stancy, trusting
her tongue with only the barest generalities on this matter.

Somerset was again dismissed for the stork topic, but Paula could
not let him alone; and she presently resumed, as if an irresistible
fascination compelled what judgment had forbidden: 'The strongest-minded
persons are sometimes caught unawares at that place, if they once think
they will retrieve their first losses; and I am not aware that he is
particularly strong-minded.'

For a moment Charlotte looked at her with a mixed expression, in which
there was deprecation that a woman with any feeling should criticize
Somerset so frigidly, and relief that