The resentment of the three ladies was soon forgotten in the excitement of the journey. Indeed, it was not long before the sea and the _Floating Leaf_ and the thought of their life in Europe seemed to fall under the horizon of the mind, and they saw only the new beauty and strangeness of the country where they found themselves. As Quentin remarked, nowhere else in the world were such refined harmonies of colour in landscape to be seen or such subtleties of tone. The river wound secretly and intimately deep among the emerald hills, with their dragon crags; now between lines of willows putting out a mist of silvery-grey leaves, a mist deepened here into a tender blue, there into a subtle rose; now through the delicate umber shadows of some flowery gorge among jade-hued rocks. Here a bridge spanned the river, springing from a group of trees and gracefully completing the rhythm of the valley; there a village nestled by some profound logic in the nook of a hill; once and again was some glimpse of the forest, or of the white, slender beam of a rushing cascade that plunged down from distant fells in harmonious passion. Over all floated white clouds like masses of blossoms, and it was as if the forces of Nature and the hand of man had united to suggest a landscape-dream of some profoundly meditating, non-human spirit, in which man had his place with the plum-blossom, the torrent and the black-bird on the branch. They went slowly, by sail and pole, in three boats. Terence, as mystical leader of the expedition, sat in the first beside Such-a-one. Quentin took his morning exercise in the second, thrusting with the bamboo pole, and Frew-Gaff his in the third. They called to one another, startling coot, mallard and teal from the reeds. Ambrose was with Frew-Gaff and the two girls in the third boat. Lychnis and Ruby lay curled up on one side, looking out; Ambrose on the other. A shout came over to them from Quentin: “How are the maiden skins?” For answer Lychnis clapped the small hands that lay in her sleeves like petals, and Fulke, in another window, was observed trying in vain to catch her eye. Then, at another shout from Quentin, she asked to be put out on the bank, and met him. It was a rice-field, and half a dozen blue-clad labourers were at work there. “I’m tired of standing still,” Quentin observed, strutting and striding in his magnificent robe, a blur of deep blue that gave emphasis to the whole riverside scene. “So am I,” she answered; “my legs want to run.” She picked up her robe, and her green trousers flashed over the field like a pair of parrots. Ruby, who had scrambled ashore after her, followed, and her legs flashed like flamingoes.