The holiday makers had all gone home. The French matron who had taken her rest so luxuriously, surrounded by her olivebranches, had put on her boots and departed. The women who sold cakes and fruit, and wooden paper-knives, had packed up their wares and gone away. All was silence and loneliness; and for a little while Daphne and her companions wandered on in quiet enjoyment of the scene and the atmosphere, treading the mossy, sandy path that wound in and out among the big rocks, sometimes nearly losing themselves, and anon following the blue arrow points which a careful hand had painted on the rocks to show them which way they should go. But Daphne was not given to silence. She found something to talk about before they had gone very far. ‘You have travelled immensely, I suppose?’ she said to the stranger. ‘I don’t know exactly what significance you attach to the word. Young ladies use such large words nowadays for such very small things. From a scientific explorer’s point of view, my wanderings have been very limited, but I daresay one of Cook’s tourists would consider me a respectable traveller. I have never seen the buried cities of Central America, nor surveyed the world from the top of Mount Everest, nor even climbed the Caucasus, nor wandered by stormy Hydaspes: but I have done Egypt, and Algeria, and Greece, and all that is tolerably worth seeing in Southern Europe, and have tried my hand, or rather my legs, at Alpine climbing, and have come to the conclusion that, although Nature is mountainous, life is everywhere more or less flat, stale, and unprofitable.’ ‘I’m sure I shouldn’t feel that if I were free to roam the world, and could paint as sweetly as you do.’ ‘I had a sweet subject, remember.’ ‘Please don’t,’ cried Daphne; ‘I rather like you when you are rude, but if you flatter I shall hate you.’ ‘Then I’ll be rude. To win your liking I would be more uncivil than Petruchio.’ ‘Katharine was a fool!’ exclaimed Daphne, skipping up the craggy side of one of the biggest rocks. ‘I have always despised her. To begin so well, and end so tamely.’ ‘If you don’t take care you’ll end by slipping off that rock, and spraining an ankle or two,’ said Nero warningly. ‘Not I,’ answered Daphne confidently; ‘you don’t know how used I am to climbing. Oh, look at that too delicious lizard!’ She was on her knees admiring the emerald-hued changeful creature. She touched it only with her breath, and it flashed away from her and vanished in some crevice of the rock. ‘Silly thing, did it think I wanted to hurt it, when I was only worshipping its beauty?’ she cried.