“Thank you, Charlie,” said Marion, laughing, “I’ll not forget your promise.” And then, turning to Cissy, she asked if she knew anyone else at Altes besides Lady Severn. “I had one or two introductions,” Mrs. Archer replied, “but I know no one personally, except old Major and Mrs. Berwick, who are residents there. They used to live at Clifton, and one of the daughters was at school with me. She can’t be very young now, for she was some years older than I.” And so, chatting from time to time they beguiled the weariness of a long day shut up in a railway carriage. Charlie fortunately was very good, and when he got tired of looking out of the window, had the good sense to compose himself for a little siesta, which lasted till they were close to the town where they were to stay for the night. This they spent in a queer, old-world sort of hotel, where the windows of the rooms all looked into each other, and the beds were panelled into the wall, something like those in old Scotch farmhouses. I write of some few years ago. No doubt imperial rule has by this time “changé tout cela,” and, travelling in France is probably fast becoming as commonplace as anywhere else. The rest of the journey, which occupied two long days, was performed en diligence, an irksome enough mode of procedure, as those who have had the misfortune to be shut up in a coupé for twenty or thirty hours it a stretch cam testify. The country for some distance was fertile, and here and there, when one got rid of the poplars, even picturesque. But halfway to Altes on the last day, it altogether changed in character, becoming utterly waste and sterile. Now, as far as the eye could reach, nothing was to be seen on either side of the road, but long stretches of bleak, barren moorland. Hardly, indeed, correctly described by that word, for our northern moors have a decided, though peculiar, beauty of their own, wholly wanting in the great, dead-looking wastes of this part of France, known as “les landes.” To add to the gloomy effect of the scene, a close drizzling rain began to fall, and continued without the slightest break, the whole of that dreary afternoon. Marion, though neither morbid nor weak-minded, was yet, like all sensitive and refined organisations, keenly alive to the impressions of the outer world. A ray of sudden sunshine; a tiny patch of the exquisitely bright green moss, one sometimes sees amidst a mass of dingy browns and olives; or the coming unexpectedly towards the close of a dusty summer ramble on one of those fairylike wells of coolest, purest water all shaded round by a bower or drooping ferns and bracken,—these, and such things as these caused her to thrill with utterly inexpressible delight. But on the other side she, of necessity, suffered actual pain from trifles which, in coarser natures, waken no sense of jar or discord.