‘I hate moving about, and I detest hotels,’ he said; ‘I am yearning for the quiet of my own house.’ After this no more could be said. Daphne gave herself up to silent contemplation of the Jungfrau range throughout the journey, by boat and rail, hardly taking her eyes from those snowy peaks till they melted from her view, fading ghostlike in the blue ether. ‘They seem to be a part of my life,’ she said, as she turned from the carriage window with a regretful sigh; ‘I cannot bear to think that I have seen the last of them.’ ‘Only for this year,’ answered Edgar cheerily, not caring much for mountains in the abstract, but ready to admire anything that Daphne loved. ‘It is such an easy matter to come to Switzerland nowadays. The Jungfrau is as accessible as Brighton Pier.’ CHAPTER XXX. ‘THER WAS NO WIGHT, TO WHOM SHE DURSTE PLAIN.’ They had been at Montreux more than a week, and it seemed to Daphne as if she had lived half her life on the shore of the beautiful lake, with the snowy summit of the Dent du Midi rising yonder in its inaccessible grandeur, above the fertile hills of the foreground, those precipitous green slopes, where _châlets_ and farms were dotted about picturesquely in positions that would have seemed perilous for birds’ nests. The villa was charming; a white-walled _château_ all plate-glass windows, verandahs, balconies, brightened from roof to basement by crimson and white Spanish blinds. The rooms were prettily furnished in a foreign style—commodes, cabinets, clocks, candelabra, and Louis Quatorze chairs of a painfully upright architecture. To these Sir Vernon had added several easy-chairs and couches of the _pouf_ species, hired from an upholsterer at Geneva. Photographs in velvet or ivory frames, books, work-baskets, easels, and five-o’clock tea-tables, brought from South Hill, gave a home-like air to the rooms; and a profusion of the loveliest flowers, exquisitely arranged, told of Madoline’s presence. There was a delicious garden sloping down to the lake, whose gently-curving shore made here a lovely bay; a garden in which roses grew as they only grow in the neighbourhood of water. There were summer-houses of the airiest construction; trellised walks, rose-shaded; a parterre of carefully-chosen flowers, with a fountain in the centre; and the blue bright water at the edge of the lawn.