‘He will show himself more amiable presently. You will get a good view of him in five minutes if you focus your glass properly and don’t chatter.’ Daphne spoke never a word, but stood motionless, with her landscape glass glued to her eyes, and waited, as for a divine revelation. Yes, yonder it arose, white and cloudlike on the edge of the blue summer sky, the mighty snow-clad range, of which Mont Blanc is but a detail—the grand inaccessible region; mountain-top beyond mountain-top; peak above peak; everlasting, untrodden hills, producing nothing, pasturing nothing, stupendous and ghastly as the polar seas; a world apart from all other worlds; a spectacle to awe the dullest soul and thrill the coldest heart; a revelation of Nature’s Titanic beauty. ‘Oh, it must have been such mountains as those that the Titans hurled about them when they fought with Zeus,’ cried Daphne when she had gazed and gazed till the last gleam of those white crests vanished in the distance. ‘Do you feel better?’ asked Gerald, with his mocking smile. ‘I feel as if I had seen the world that we are to know after death,’ answered Daphne. ‘Would you be surprised to hear that these excrescences, which you think so grand, are but modern incidents in the history of the earth? Time was when Switzerland was one vast ice-field: nay, if we can believe Lyell, the clay of London was in course of accumulation as marine mud at a time when the ocean still rolled its waves over the space now occupied by some of the loftiest Alpine summits.’ ‘Please don’t be instructive,’ exclaimed Daphne. ‘I want to know nothing about them, except that they are there, and that they are beautiful.’ At Fribourg they drove down the narrow street to the Zähringer Hof, the hotel by the suspension bridge, where from a balcony they looked down a sheer descent to the river, and to the roofs and chimneys of the old town lying in a cleft of the hills, while yonder, suspended in mid-air, a mere spider-thread across the sky, stretched the upper and loftier bridge. It was nearly dinner-time when they arrived. There were dark clouds on the horizon, and only gleams of watery sunshine behind the gray old watch-towers on the crest of the hill across the river. ‘I’m afraid we are going to have another storm,’ said Gerald, lounging against the embrasure of a window, and looking as if Fribourg, with its modern suspension bridges and mediæval watch-towers, were just the most uninteresting place in the world. He looked thoroughly worn-out and weary, as if he had been labouring hard with body and mind all day, instead of lolling in a railway-carriage, staring listlessly at the landscape. Sir Vernon, the ostensible invalid, was not more languid.