. I
should have liked to know what was behind the door; but I daresay there
was nothing much, really.

She, too, had come to look for amber and other things. I don't know
about the other things, but she didn't find the amber.

At eleven o'clock, after seeing something of the place, we slipped away
toward Machynlleth, along a hilly road, which grew lovelier with each of
its many twists among low mountains. Now, said Sir Lionel, we were about
to see the heart of Wales; and I should soon have realized that without
his telling, for as we slowed down to pass through little villages we
heard the children talking Welsh--a soft, pleasant language, which I can
only try to describe by saying that it sounded like whispering out loud.
But that is a very Irish description!

The scenery was so gentle in its beauty that my wild, excited mood was
lulled by its soft influence. The colour of landscape and sky kept the
delicate tints of spring, though we are in full, rich summer; and there
was none of the tropical verdure we saw near Tenby; no crimson fountains
of fuchsias, no billows of blood-red roses, and fierce southern flowers.
Pale honey-suckle draped the gray or whitewashed stone cottages. Rocks
and crannies of walls were daintily fringed with ferns, or cushioned
with the velvet of moss, and crusted with tarnished golden lichen. A
modern-timbered house, rising pertly here and there, looked out of place
among dwellings whose early owners quarried each stone from among their
own mountains.

As we left the fairy glades of those wooded hills for rugged mountains
scantily clad with ragged grass, slate-quarries tried their ugly best to
blotch and spoil the scene, but owing to some strange charm of
atmosphere, like a gauze veil on the stage, they could not quite
succeed. By and by the gauze veil turned to rain, but rain suited the
wild landscape--far better, by the way, than it suited Mrs. Senter,
whose nightly hair-wavers are but a reed to lean upon in wet weather.
She made some excuse to come behind with Emily and me, and before the
car started again I summoned courage to ask if I might take her place,
saying I loved to feel the rain.

So there I was with Sir Lionel once more; and I wondered if he thought
of that night when we rushed through the storm from Tintagel to
Clovelly? Soon this also bade fair to be a storm, for the rain began to
tumble out of the sky, rather than fall, as if an army of people stood
throwing down water by