So Vane went to many places that summer. It is customary in romances for men thus wandering to be haunted by the thought of something. Vane was haunted by the thought of nothing. He did not even think of Miss Thomas, or, if he thought of her, it was to think that he thought nothing of her; it is nearly the same thing. He began by going to Biarritz and Lourdes, in the path of the pilgrims. At Lourdes there is a modern, ugly church upon a hill, with modern, manufactured glass within; the grotto is underneath, surrounded always by hundreds of pilgrims--many bedridden, some dying. The figure of the Virgin is robed in a white gown, with a blue silk wrapper and a golden crown. You may buy small replicas of it in the shops. Vane was duly shocked, as becomes a Protestant. But one thing he liked in Lourdes--an expression he heard used by an old priest in defending the miracle. It was, he said, an example of the divine foolishness of the ways of God--the Virgin's appearance to a simple child. Vane fancied that there might be follies that had something in them of divine and much good sense that smacked only of the world and the flesh. One got plenty of good sense in New York. When he left Lourdes he went eastward, through Gascony and Languedoc. The sweet contentment of the harvest was over the country, the healthy happiness of nature's reproduction, of fruitage and of growing seed. All earth and nature is happy where it is not conscious. There was a mighty harvest that year, and all the people of the country were busied with it, getting themselves their daily bread, delivered, for the time, from evil. In the south of France there are wide plains and cornfields, and in them is more than one great dead city, sleeping like some old warrior in the peaceful afternoon of his days. The huge armor of cyclopean walls has served its time, but still stands out, frowning, from the sea of yellow grain; the city inside has shrunk within the walls, and no longer fills them. Such a place is Aigues Mortes or Carcassonne; nestling in the arms of fortresses, quiet and still, as if protected by them and lulled to sleep. Stern in semblance as these walls may be, they are pasteboard, like Don Quixote's helmet; they date from less noisy days than ours; the mortarless masonry would rattle to the ground at the sound of cannon. However, they have been of use in older days, and it is pleasant, even now, to wander in the summer by the shadow of the walls and look out upon the farms and the green things growing.