"If you choose to abandon your understanding to the three immensities that surround us, the air, the water, and the sand, listening solely to the repeated sound of the flow and the outflow," I replied, "you will not be able to endure its language; you will fancy that you discover therein a thought which will overwhelm you. Yesterday, at sunset, I had that sensation; it prostrated me." "Oh, yes, let us talk," she said, after a long pause. "No orator can be more terrible than this silence. I fancy that I have discovered the causes of the harmony which surrounds us," she continued. "This landscape, which has only three sharp colours, the brilliant yellow of the sand, the blue of the sky, and the smooth green of the sea, is grand without being wild, it is immense without being a desert, it is changeless without being monotonous; it has only three elements, but it is diversified." "Women alone can express their impressions thus," I replied; "you would drive a poet to despair, dear heart, whom I divined so perfectly." "The excessive noonday heat imparts a gorgeous colour to those three expressions of infinity," replied Pauline, laughing. "I can imagine here the poesy and the passion of the Orient." "And I can imagine its despair." "Yes," she said; "that dune is a sublime cloister." We heard the hurried step of our guide; he had dressed himself in his best clothes. We said a few formal words to him; he evidently saw that our frame of mind had changed, and, with the reserve that misfortune imparts, he kept silent. Although we pressed each other's hands from time to time, to advise each other of the unity of our impressions, we walked for half an hour in silence, whether because we were overwhelmed by the heat, which rose in shimmering waves from the sand, or because the difficulty of walking absorbed our attention. We walked on, hand in hand, like two children; we should not have taken a dozen steps if we had been arm in arm. The road leading to Batz was not marked out; a gust of wind was enough to efface the footprints of horses or the wheel-ruts; but our guide's practised eye recognised the road by the droppings of cattle or of horses. Sometimes it went down towards the sea, sometimes rose towards the upland, at the caprice of the slopes, or to skirt a rock. At noon, we were only half-way. "We will rest there," said I, pointing to a promontory formed of rocks high enough to lead one to suppose that we should find a grotto there. When I spoke, the fisherman, who had followed the direction of my finger, shook his head and said: "There's some one there! People who go from Batz to Le Croisic, or from Le Croisic to Batz, always make a detour in order not to pass that rock." The man said this in a low voice, and we divined a mystery. "Is he a thief, an assassin?" Our guide replied only by a long-drawn breath which increased our curiosity. "But will anything happen to us if we pass by there?" "Oh no!" "Will you go with us?" "No, monsieur."