Flying down the perfect road towards the plain where two rivers met, loved, and wedded, the valley which was the white mountain's lap blended vague, soft greens and blues and purples, hinting of grapes and figs clustering under leaves. Here and there a vine had been nipped by early frosts and flung its crimson wreaths, like diadems of rubies, in a red arch across distant billows of mountain snows. Autumn was in the air, and though the grass and most of the trees kept all their richness of summer greenery, a faint, pungent fragrance of dying leaves and the smoke of bonfires came to one's nostrils with the breeze. Mingled with the exciting scent of petrol, it was delicious. At the confluence of the newly married Drac and Isère rose the domes and towers of stately old Grenoble, hoary with history; and never a town had a nobler setting. Swooping down in half-circles, as if our car had been a great bird of prey, we saw the valley veiled with a silver haze, which wrapped the city in mystery, while through this gleaming gauze the two rivers threaded like strings of turquoise beads. "How the Boy would have loved this!" I found myself exclaiming over my shoulder to Molly. "He used often to talk of the great charm of descending from heights upon places, especially new-old places, which one has never seen before." "Used he?" echoed Molly. "Why, that is rather odd. It is exactly what Mercédès has just been saying." The Perpetual Mushroom moved impatiently. I fancied by the movement of her shoulder that she resented having her thoughts passed on to me. I hastened to turn away, sorry that I had reminded her inadvertently of my cumbersome existence; but I could not help wondering what she had been thinking of in the monastery when we had walked for full five moments side by side. There was no disappointment when we had plunged into the silver haze, torn it apart, and entered the town over a dignified bridge. All around us spread the city old and new; above, on the hills, were numerous châteaux, a strange fort, and the queerest of ancient convents, like the cork castles I had seen in shop windows and coveted as a child. In the town there were statues, many statues--statues everywhere and in honour of everybody. Bayard was there, dying; and there was a delightfully human old fellow (humorous even in marble) who cleverly "lay low" till his worst enemy had finished an elaborately fortified castle, then promptly took it. Not a spacious modern street that had not at least one magnificent old palace, a façade of joyous Renaissance invention, or at least a crumbling mediæval doorway of divine beauty; and nothing of romance was lost because Grenoble makes gloves for all the world.