the old-fashioned style. She
was dressed like a traveling Englishwoman, in awkward, queer clothing,
like a person who is indifferent to dress. She was eating an omelet and
drinking water.

Her face was peculiar, with restless eyes and the expression of one
with whom fate has dealt unkindly. I watched her, in spite of myself,
thinking: "Who is she? What is the life of this woman? Why is she
wandering alone through these mountains?"

She paid and rose to leave, drawing up over her shoulders an astonishing
little shawl, the two ends of which hung over her arms. From a corner
of the room she took an alpenstock, which was covered with names traced
with a hot iron; then she went out, straight, erect, with the long steps
of a letter-carrier who is setting out on his route.

A guide was waiting for her at the door, and both went away. I watched
them go down the valley, along the road marked by a line of high wooden
crosses. She was taller than her companion, and seemed to walk faster
than he.

Two hours later I was climbing the edge of the deep funnel that incloses
Lake Pavin in a marvelous and enormous basin of verdure, full of trees,
bushes, rocks, and flowers. This lake is so round that it seems as if
the outline had been drawn with a pair of compasses, so clear and blue
that one might deem it a flood of azure come down from the sky, so
charming that one would like to live in a but on the wooded slope which
dominates this crater, where the cold, still water is sleeping.
The Englishwoman was standing there like a statue, gazing upon the
transparent sheet down in the dead volcano. She was straining her
eyes to penetrate below the surface down to the unknown depths, where
monstrous trout which have devoured all the other fish are said to live.
As I was passing close by her, it seemed to me that two big tears were
brimming her eyes. But she departed at a great pace, to rejoin her
guide, who had stayed behind in an inn at the foot of the path leading
to the lake.

I did not see her again that day.

The next day, at nightfall, I came to the chateau of Murol. The old
fortress, an enormous tower standing on a peak in the midst of a large
valley, where three valleys intersect, rears its brown, uneven, cracked
surface into the sky; it is round, from its large circular base to the
crumbling turrets on its pinnacles.

It astonishes the eye more than any other ruin by its simple mass,
its majesty, its grave and imposing air of