Here at the Jungfraublich they found a charming suite of rooms prepared for them; rooms not gorgeously furnished or richly ornamented, but with long French windows which looked upon as fair a landscape as the eye of man could desire to behold. There rose the Jungfrau in her sublime beauty, above the fertile valley with its lakes and meadows, its _châlets_ and gardens, orchards and _bosquets_; all the simplicity and prettiness of Nature on a small scale lying at the feet of the immensities. It was twilight when they arrived, and the first star of evening, a faint luminous spot in the blue gray, hovered over the snowy pinnacle of the mountain. ‘Oh, you dear!’ cried Daphne, to the mountain and not to the star; ‘you will be a part of my life from this night. How shall I ever live without you when I go back to Warwickshire?’ ‘You will have to console yourself with an occasional glimpse of the Wrekin or the Cotswolds,’ said Madoline, laughing. ‘I am almost sorry I ever came to Switzerland,’ murmured Daphne, turning away from the open window with a sigh, when she had gazed, and gazed, as if she would fain have made herself a part of the thing she looked at. ‘Why, dearest?’ asked Lina. ‘Because I shall be always longing to come back here. I shall never be able to tolerate the eternal flatness of home—mole-hills instead of mountains.’ ‘Hawksyard is rather flat, I admit,’ said Edgar, apologetically; ‘but it is remarkably well drained. There isn’t a healthier house in England.’ ‘Will not all their modern aestheticism—their Queen Anne worship; their straight garden walks, and straight-backed chairs; their everlasting tea-trays, and Japanese screens, and sunflowers, and dadoes—sicken you after this mountain-land?’ cried Daphne. ‘Such a narrow, petty, childish idea of beauty! Have these perpendicular people ever seen the Jungfrau, do you suppose?’ ‘Seen her, and outlived her, and ascended to a higher empyrean of art,’ answered Gerald. ‘You poor child, do you know that you are going into raptures about things which a well-bred person would hardly deign to mention, any more than a Pytchley man would stoop to talk about the Brighton Harriers? This is cockney Switzerland, as cockney as the Trossachs, or Killarney, as Ramsgate and Margate. Everybody knows the Jungfrau, at least by sight; everybody has been at Interlaken. It is the chief rendezvous of the travellers who come in flocks, and are driven from pillar to post like sheep, with an intelligent interpreter playing the part of sheep-dog. I hope you will do the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa before you go home; and then you will be acquainted with a brace of mountains which may be spoken about in polite society.’ ‘The Jungfrau is good enough for me,’ answered Daphne; ‘I shall never behold anything more beautiful. Manfred loved her.’