They were leaving Fontainebleau far behind them by this time; its old church, and its palace, with all its historic memories of Francis and Henri, Napoleon and Pius VII. The forest was but a dark spot in the vanishing distance; they were speeding away to the rich wine country with its vast green plains, and steep hillsides clothed with vines. At two o’clock they were at Dijon, and seemed to have been travelling a week. Sir Vernon grumbled at the dust and heat, and regretted that he had undertaken the whole journey in a day. ‘We ought to have stayed the night at Dijon,’ he said fretfully, when they were out of the station, steaming away towards Macon, after a hurried luncheon in the well-furnished refreshment-room. ‘It is a wretchedly dull place to stop at, sir,’ said Gerald; ‘hardly anything to see.’ ‘At my age a man does not want always to be seeing things,’ growled Sir Vernon; ‘he wants rest.’ The day had been oppressively hot—a sultry heat, a sunbaked landscape. Madoline and her sister bore it with admirable patience, beguiling the tedium of those long hours now with conversation, now with books, anon with quiet contemplation of the landscape, which for a long way offered no striking features. It was growing towards evening when they entered the Jura region, and found themselves in a world that was really worth looking at: a wild strange world, as it appeared to Daphne’s eye; vast rolling masses of hill that seemed to have been thrown up in long waves before this little world assumed shape and solidity; precipitous green slopes, grassy walls that shut out the day, and the deep rapid river cleaving its tumultuous course through the trough of the hills. ‘Don’t you think this is better than Stratford-upon-Avon?’ asked Gerald mockingly, as he watched Daphne’s excited face, her eyes wide with wonder. ‘Ever so much wilder and grander. I should like to live here.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because in such a world one would forget oneself. One’s own poor little troubles would seem too mean and trumpery to be thought about.’ ‘No man’s trouble is small or mean to the sufferer himself,’ replied Gerald. ‘There is nothing grand or dignified in the abstract notion of Job’s boils; yet to him they meant an unendurable agony which tempted him to curse his Creator and destroy his own life. I don’t believe the grandest natural surroundings would lessen one’s sense of the thorn in one’s side.’ ‘I don’t think you have any thorns, Daphne,’ said Edgar tenderly, ‘or that you need take refuge from your sorrows among these desolate-looking mountains.’ ‘Of course not. I was only speaking generally,’ answered Daphne lightly; ‘but oh! what a mighty world it is—hills that climb to the sky, and such lovely tranquil valleys lying between those dark earth walls. Vines, and water-mills, and waterfalls tumbling over rocky beds. If Switzerland is much grander than this, I think its grandeur will kill me. I can hardly breathe when I look up at those great dark hills.’