The season was too early for high passes, and the weather was changeable. They started from Fribourg and walked to Thun and then back to Bulle, and so to Bultigen, Saanen, Montbovon and the Lake of Geneva. They had rain several days, the sweet, soft, windless mountain rain that seemed so tolerable to those who are accustomed to the hard and driven downpours of England, and in places they found mud and receding snow; the inns were at their homeliest, and none the worse for that, and there were days of spring sunshine when a multitude of minute and delightful flowers came out as it seemed to meet them--it was impossible to suppose so great a concourse universal--and spread in a scented carpet before their straying feet. The fruit trees in the valleys were powdered with blossom, and the new grass seemed rather green-tinted sunlight than merely green. And they walked with a sort of stout leisureliness, knapsacks well-hung and cloaks about them, with their faces fresh and bright under the bracing weather, and their lungs deep charged with mountain air, talking of the new austerer life that was now beginning. With great snow-capped mountains in the background, streaming precipices overhead, and a sward of flowers to go upon, that strenuous prospect was altogether delightful. They went as it pleased them, making detours into valleys, coming back upon their steps. The interludes of hot, bright April sunshine made them indolent, and they would loiter and halt where some rock or wall invited, and sit basking like happy, animals, talking very little, for long hours together. Trafford seemed to have forgotten all the strain and disappointment of the past two years, to be amazed but in no wise incredulous at this enormous change in her and in their outlook; it filled her with a passion of pride and high resolve to think that so she could recover and uplift him. He was now very deeply in love with her again. He talked indeed of his research, but so that it might interest her, and when he thought alone, he thought, not of it, but of her, making again the old discoveries, his intense delight in the quality of her voice, his joy in a certain indescribable gallantry in her bearing. He pitied all men whose wives could not carry themselves, and whose voices failed and broke under the things they had to say. And then again there was the way she moved her arms, the way her hands took hold of things, the alert lucidity of her eyes, and then that faint, soft shadow of a smile upon her lips when she walked thinking or observant, all unaware that he was watching her.