. And the privilege of being a brother."

CHAPTER XII

It would be a singularly hard-headed, cold-hearted person who could set
out for Vaucluse without the smallest thrill; and hard heads and cold
hearts don't "run in our family." As we spun away from the Hotel de
l'Europe soon after two o'clock that afternoon I felt that I was largely
composed of thrill. Cold as the wind had grown, the thrill kept me warm,
mingling in my veins with ozone.

Inside the car the middle-aged honeymooners had an air of desperate
resignation which the consciousness of doing their duty according to
Baedeker gives to tourists. The tap was turned on in the newly invented
heating-apparatus in the car floor, through which hot water from the
radiator can be made to circulate; and I wondered, if this extreme
measure were resorted to already, what would be left to do when we
reached those high, white altitudes of which the chauffeur had been
speaking. I prayed that Lady Turnour might not read in the papers about
the "phenomenal fall of snow" in those regions, for if she did I was
afraid that even Mr. Dane's magnetic powers of persuasion might fail to
get her there. He might dangle Queen Margherita of Italy over her head
in vain, if worst came to worst: for what are queens to the most
inveterate tuft-hunters if the feet be cold? Yet now that "adventures"
were vaguely prophesied, I felt I could not give up the promised gorges
and mountains.

Out of Avignon we slid, past the old, old ramparts and the newer but
impressive walls, and turned at the right into the Marseilles road.
"Vaucluse!" said a kilometre-stone, and then another and another
repeated that enchanted and enchanting word, as we flew onward between
the Rhone and the Durance.

This was our own old way again, as far as the Pont de Bonpas; then our
road wound to the northeast, away from the world we knew--I said to
myself--and into a world of romance, a world created by the love of
Petrarch for Laura, and sacred to those two for ever more.

The ruined castle, with machicolated towers and haughty buttresses, on
the great rampart of a hill, was for me the porter's lodge at the
entrance gate of an enchanted garden, where poetic flowers of love
bloomed through seasons and centuries; laurels, roses, and lilies, and
pansies for remembrance. We didn't see those flowers with our bodies'
eyes, but what of that? What did it matter that to the Turnours in their
splendid glass cage this was