Felicia, meanwhile, had carried Maud off to the 'Gully,' a mountain retreat some twenty miles away, where purer air and a less constrained life were to be had than at Elysium. It was, in fact, nothing more than one of a cluster of log-huts, built years before, when a working party of soldiers had been cutting one of the grand military roads that traverse the mountains in these parts, and sold offhand, when the work was done, for what they would fetch to the first comer. Felicia and her husband had been encamped in the neighbourhood, and had fallen in love with the wildness of the place, the exquisitely pure air, the huge towering pines, which gave the scene a character of its own, and, moreover, with the unfamiliar idea of owning a part of the Himalayas in freehold. For a few hundred rupees, accordingly, Vernon had become possessor of the huts and some adjoining acres, and since then Felicia's embellishing hand had worked wonders. Nature, as if in gratitude for unaccustomed devotion, lent herself in a lavish mood to beautify the little structure. A profuse growth of creepers festooned the porch; a delicious piece of turf, bright, smooth and soft, and broken only by one or two projecting crags, stretched down the mountain-side in front; inside the rough deodar paling the beds were all ablaze with English flowers that not even Felicia's tenderness could coax into healthiness in the plain below. 'These are my invalids,' Felicia said, to whom this spot was always full of charms: 'I send them up with the babies to breathe a little wholesome air. Shut your eyes, Maud, and smell this--cannot you fancy yourself in a sweet English wood in June?' There were other beauties, moreover, about the place than those of an English summer. They were hanging in a little picturesque nook of safety, but all around them was sublime. Storms gathered and crashed and spent their fury as if this was their very home where they could play at ease. An inky mass came lowering over the heights above and shed itself in one angry deluge on the mountain-side; the thunder crashed in fierce echoes from crag to crag, and all the heavens blazed from end to end as the fearful fiery zig-zags came darting out of the gloom; then the tempest would pass away and nothing be heard but the distant rumble and the hundred muddy torrents roaring downwards. The great folds of mist came swirling up the precipice, wrapping everything for a few moments in gloom; then they would pass on, and presently again the sky be serene and bright, and the reeking mountains sun themselves gleefully in the brightness and warmth that were everywhere present. 'It is beautiful,' Maud said, 'but too grand to be quite pleasant; it is rather awful. That black mountain opposite, with its army of skeleton deodars, makes me shudder.'