All round and far up behind the house towered a vast amphitheatre of mountains clothed in every spur and gorge with wood or terraced orchard, and crested by towered villages almost to their tossing peaks, uplifted, bare, and beautiful, with amethyst veining and delicate snow-streaks, into the intense velvety blue sky. Except where the ridge ran up behind the house into a little crest topped by dark green pines glowing vividly on the vivid sky, and then plunged on into the mountains' heart, the garden stood isolated on the edge of the sheer ridge that fell from the sun-facing front in steep terraces of lemon orchard, vineyard, and garden down to the torrent bed, crawling slowly, slowly, among houses and gardens half hidden in trees, to the mass of clean, red-brown roofs, that lay with never a smoke-stain among trees by the sea, like an estuary of masonry. Thence on the East a hill-spur suddenly rose and ran back into the mountains, hiding from view the harbour with its shipping and all the old town, except one church-tower raised above the hill and outlined upon the sea. And on every hill-slope and steep, terrace after terrace of vine, and olive, and lemon with golden fruit, and mimosa in golden bloom, or pine woods in clefts and on abrupt steeps. And everywhere small houses, growing smaller as they rose on the heights, with ruddy brown roofs and walls of clean pink and blue and white; and all this bathed and flooded and steeped in such transparence and clarity of sunlight as the Children of the Mist see never in their own dim poetic shores. Ermengarde was speechless, all eye and ear, breathing in the warm, spiced, exhilarating air, that never a ruffle stirred, as if it were life for both soul and body, and not knowing how she had parted company with the gentle, soft-eyed creature that had borne her up into this paradise. Something cool touched her cheek; it was a lemon hanging from a dark-leaved branch. Her skirts swept a little forest of scented oak-leaf geranium, so sturdy and compact of growth one could almost stand on it; then they brushed a border thick-set with double stocks one mass of solid bloom. Here were geraniums, trees, not plants, with hard stems, their velvety leaves crimson, olive, and orange; here on a wall strong almond perfume gave token of a curtain of heliotrope in flower; and, as in the road below, "it was roses, roses all the way," from marble-stepped terrace to terrace, on bush and trellis and wall and balustrade. "Will they want to assassinate me for this, Madame?" M. Isidore asked, regarding her with amused satisfaction. "When one reaches paradise, does one quarrel with the paths to it?"