However much he might affect to despise the familiar route, he could not deny the beauty of the landscape by-and-by, when they were all seated in the carriage and had crossed the Lutschine for the first time, and were climbing slowly up the raised road above the river. It was a brilliant morning, the wooded hills steeped in sunlight and balmy summer air; the tender green of the young shoots showing bright against the sombre darkness of the everlasting pines; water rushing down the hillsides every here and there, sometimes a torrent, sometimes a fine thread like spun glass, dropping from crag to crag. The two young men got out of the carriage and walked up the hills; the valley through which the road wound was exquisitely verdant—a scene of pastoral beauty, fertile, richly wooded, but passing lonely. Daphne sorely missed the dappled kine which relieve and animate a Warwickshire landscape. ‘What in Heaven’s name has become of the cattle?’ she exclaimed. ‘Here are meadows, and homesteads, and gardens, and orchards, but not a living object in the landscape. I thought Switzerland swarmed with cows, and was musical with cowbells. And where is the chorus of herdsmen singing the “_Ranz des Vaches_?”’ ‘Perhaps there has been an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, and the cows have all been condemned,’ speculated Edgar. Gerald explained that the cattle and their keepers had all gone up into the higher regions to crop the summer herbage. ‘And that accounts for this green and silent valley,’ said Daphne. ‘It is rather a romantic idea; but I should have liked to see the cattle all the same. I adore cows. I think a Jersey cow, with her stag-like head and eyes, is almost the loveliest thing in creation.’ ‘You shall have a herd of them at Hawksyard,’ exclaimed Edgar eagerly; ‘and I will build you a Swiss cowhouse at the end of the walnut walk.’ ‘Thank you so much,’ said Daphne, with a faint smile, ‘but I was thinking of them only in the abstract.’ There were times when any allusion to Hawksyard and the future irritated her like the sting of a summer insect. Children appeared at every turn of the circuitous road. Here a sickly, large-eyed girl offered a handful of dingy edelweiss; there an unkempt ill-fed boy ran beside the horses, flapping off the flies with a leafy branch of ash or walnut; anon appeared the mountain musician playing his plaintive strain upon the native horn, and waking melancholiest echoes amid the solemn hills. The road crossed the river several times, over covered bridges, wooden arcades, which made a picturesque bit in the landscape, a pleasant lounging place too, on such a summer morning. But there seemed to be nobody about save the fly-flapping boys, and women and children offering new milk or the everlasting edelweiss. It was the first time Daphne had seen the little velvety white flower, and she was keenly interested in it.