But in the Fontainebleau woods there are rocky glades which English forests cannot boast—wild walks between walls of gigantic granite boulders—queer shapes of monsters and animals in gray stone, which seem to leap out at one from the shadows as one passes; innumerable pine-trees; hills and hollows; pathways carpeted with red fir-needles, mosses, ferns, and wild-flowers; and a bluer brighter sky than the heaven which roofs an English landscape. ‘Isn’t this worlds better than Asnières?’ asked Daphne of her companion; ‘and aren’t you ever so grateful to those poor girls for catching scarlet-fever?’ Asnières was school and constraint, Fontainebleau was liberty; so if the forest had been a poorer place, Daphne, who hated all restraints, would have loved it. ‘Poor girls!’ sighed Martha Dibb, a stupid, honest-minded young person, whose father kept an Italian warehouse in New Oxford street, and whose mother had been seized with the aspiration to have her daughters finished at Continental schools; whereby one Miss Dibb was being half-starved upon sausage and cabbage at Hanover, while the other grew fat upon _croûte au pot_ and _bouilli_ in the neighbourhood of Paris, and was supposed to be acquiring the true Parisian accent. ‘Poor girls; it was very bad for them,’ sighed Martha. ‘Yes; but it was very good for us,’ answered Daphne lightly; ‘and if it was a part of their destiny to have scarlet-fever, how very nice of them to have it in the term instead of in the holidays, when we shouldn’t have profited by it.’ ‘And how lucky that we had that good-natured Miss Toby sent with us instead of one of the French governesses.’ ‘Lucky, indeed!’ cried Daphne, with her bright laugh. ‘That good simple Toby, with whom we can do exactly what we like, and who is the image of quiet contentment, so long as she has even the stupidest novel to read, and some acid-drops to suck. I tremble when I think of the amount of acid-drops she must consume in the course of a year.’ ‘Why do you give her so many?’ asked the practical Martha. ‘They are my peace-offerings when I have been especially troublesome,’ said Daphne, with the air of a sinner who glories in her troublesomeness. ‘Poor dear old Toby! if I were to give her a block of sweetstuff as tall as King Cheops’s pyramid, it wouldn’t atone for the life I lead her.’ ‘I hope she won’t get into trouble with Madame for letting us run wild like this,’ suggested Miss Dibb doubtfully.