After luncheon they all sat idly looking down at the distant lake, lying so far beneath their feet, like a pool of blue water in the hollow of the hills, or wandered a little here and there, searching out higher points from which to look down at the lake, or across to the cloud-wrapped Alps. As the day wore on the light western breeze dropped and died away, and there came the stillness of a sultry August afternoon, just such an atmosphere as that of the lotus-eaters’ isle, the land where it was always afternoon. Aunt Rhoda, who had lunched more copiously than the others, succumbed to the enervating influence of summer. The outline antimacassar on which she had been diligently stitching a design of infantine simplicity—a little girl with a watering-pot, a little boy with an umbrella—dropped from her hands. The blue lake below winked at her in the sunshine like a Titanic eye. The soft sweet breath of the pines gratified her nostrils, and that delicious sense of being gently baked through and through in Nature’s slow oven finally overcame her, and she sank into a thoroughly enjoyable slumber, a sleep in which she knew she was sleeping, and tasted all the blessedness of repose. Daphne sat on a knoll a little way below her aunt, struggling with a sunflower, heartily tired of it all the time, and painfully oppressed by the consciousness of three hundred and fifty-one sunflowers remaining to be done after this one. ‘It is like the line of the Egyptian kings,’ she murmured with a sigh. ‘An endless procession—too stupendous for the imagination to grasp.’ Edgar, stretched at the feet of his adored, had fallen as fast asleep as Aunt Rhoda. Madoline and Gerald had wandered off to the higher grounds. They were going to the Col du Jaman for anything Daphne knew to the contrary. This particular sunflower now approaching a finish seemed the most irritating of all his tribe. Daphne tightened her thread, pulled it into a knot, boggled at the knot, lost patience, and threw the work aside in a rage. ‘Who could do crewel-work on such a stifling day?’ she cried, looking angrily down at the lake, with its girdle of towns and villages, gardens and vineyards; looking angrily even at picturesque Chillon, with its mediæval turrets and drawbridge, angrily at the calm, snow-shrouded Dent du Midi, and the dark green hills around its base. Then, having explored the wide landscape with eyes blind for this moment to its beauty, she looked discontentedly at the reclining form at her feet, the faithful lover, slumbering serenely, oblivious of wasps and centipedes. ‘A log,’ she muttered to herself, ‘a log. Blind and deaf! Good; yes, I know he is good, and I try to value him for his goodness; but oh, how weary I am—how weary—how weary!’