d and trotted, until
the woodland lay below and the Signal de la Palu was reached. A wide
level space on a crest of the foot-hills--with flag staff bearing the
valorous tricolor, and rustic log-built restaurant offering
refreshment--opening upon the full splendour of the Maritime Alps.

Damaris stepped out of the carriage, and, patting the near horse on the
neck in passing, went forward across the sparse turf, starred with tiny
clear coloured flowers, to the edge of the platform.

The Provencal coachman, from his perch on the box-seat of the victoria,
his rough-caste crumpled countenance sun-baked to the solid ruddy brown
of the soil of his own vineyard, followed her movements with approving
glances.--For she was fresh as an opening rose the young English _Mees_,
and though most elegant, how agile, how evidently strong!

Innocent of the admiration she excited, Damaris stood absorbed, awed
even, by the grandeur of the scene. Many hundred feet below, the rent
chasm down which it took its course steeped in violet gloom, the
milk-white waters of an ice-fed river impetuously journeyed to the
fertile lowlands and the sea. Opposite, across the gorge, amazingly
distinct in the pellucid atmosphere, rose the high mountains, the
undefiled, untrodden and eternal snows. Azure shadow, transparent,
ethereal, haunted them, bringing into evidence enormous rounded shoulder,
cirque, crinkled glacier, knife-edge of underlying rock.

They belonged to the deepest the most superb of life, this rent gorge,
these mountains--like Faircloth's letter. Would beautiful and noble
sights, such as these, always in future give her an ache of longing for
the writer of that letter, for the romance, the poetry, of the
unacknowledged relation he bore to her? Tears smarted hot in Damaris'
eyes, and resolutely, if rather piteously, she essayed to wink them away.
For to her it just now seemed, the deepest, the most superb of life was
also in great measure the forbidden. The ache must be endured, then, the
longing go unsatisfied, since she could only stay the pain of them by
doing violence to plain and heretofore fondly cherished, duties.

But her tears defied the primitive process of winking. Not so
cheaply could she rid herself of their smart and the blurred
distorted vision they occasioned. She pulled out her handkerchief
petulantly and wiped them. Then schooled herself to a colder, more
moderate and reasonable temper.

And, so doing, her thought turne