The winged steeds were no longer yoked to the cars; they must have vanished long since with the darkness; the train moved more and more slowly. That it should gradually slacken speed to a crawl through all this magical beauty was natural; but that it should actually stop, like common trains in regions of prose, for people to get out, claim luggage and pay porters, was amazing, especially as that first superb colonnade of date-palms was seen to rise behind one of these stations--perhaps Cannes? True, they were not stations in the ordinary sense, but rather pleasant places of pause, where leisurely persons of distinguished bearing and immaculate attire, gold-braided, button-booted, and black-kid-gloved, enjoyed the amenities of a life devoid of care, incidentally remembering from time to time to bestow a kindly and condescending courtesy upon wanderers descending casually from the train of luxury, that was now enjoying a beautiful calm in singular contrast to its wild stir at starting and headlong rush through the night. Sometimes, after a long and apparently purposeless pause at one of these clean and sunny spots, an idea seemed to occur to an immaculately dressed lounger and interrupt the gentle current of his chat, if his roving glance happened to be caught by the cars. "There is a train," he seemed to say to himself; "perhaps something might as well be done with it." Then, after a little silent meditation and some smiling interchange of thoughts with an acquaintance, he would move leisurely towards the cars, and indicate by a slight, but graceful, gesture that the pause was at an end. Then the journey would be gently resumed, through a land of rich-hued blossom and glowing green, with solemn mountain steeps rising on the one hand, and the vast blue radiance of a dark blue sea breaking in soft and soundless foam on many a purple, enchanted headland, and in many a sunny bay, on the other. All the glamour of Shelley's ethereal poetry seemed to breathe and sing from that glorious sea, which Homer compared to wine in its depth of colour. All Shelley's seas are Mediterranean, and most of Byron's, while Keats and Tennyson, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, for the most part love the paler grey-blue and more frequent foam of Northern shores. Vainly did the woman of mystery remind Ermengarde that she had not breakfasted; she was feasting with gods; she needed no meaner sustenance; even the shadow of the man of mystery passing her door, and glaring insolently through his detestable goggles upon her rapt face, scarcely annoyed her, except as a momentary eclipse of some lofty headland running out into the happy morning sea. She had even forgotten that she had slept, not only in, but upon, her hat, a really successful creation from Bond Street.