The band had long stopped playing; the afternoon sunshine was growing soft, and the Jardins Publics were empty of all but a few stragglers--_bourgeois_ babies playing round mothers basking on sunny benches and among beds of carnations and cyclamen, and people crossing the paths on their way home. Agatha turned at the top of the long series of parterres bordered by orange-trees, palms, eucalyptus and pepper trees, that lay between street and street, and was bounded by the band of glowing purple sea, whence on either hand long hill-spurs ran up into the mountain amphitheatre just behind the town, and wondered at all the sunny beauty. Especially at the palms, which sprang up, straight and sturdy, everywhere closing street vistas, lending charm to featureless buildings and romance to ugly ones, and sometimes spreading their broad tops above a knot of dark-faced Arabs, lounging picturesque in burnous and fez. "It was lovely once," the man at her side granted. "The torrent bed ran down in wild, broken beauty all the way to the sea a few years since. There's your house yonder on the ridge. Do you walk up? Well, take time. The way's straight enough. Report as often as you can. Be very careful. I thought the whole thing was exploded more than once yesterday--especially----" "Oh! There was not the faintest suspicion. You were quite out in that. But I will be careful. Good-bye." He went up the road to the station; she passed under the viaduct by the torrent bed and paused, watching women stepping down under the oleanders from the other side to beat linen in the stream, and then turned and went on with a lagging step, that meant dejection more than fatigue. Winding along under the grey ghostliness of arching plane-tops was a string of pack-mules, leisurely plodding under bales and panniers; fine, strong, patient beasts, in curious contrast to the long, smoke-snorting dragon of a train that roared and rattled out of sight over the railway bridge at the avenue's end in about two hoof-beats. Were people unhappy up there in those mountain villages, where life was simple and close to Nature? There was a restfulness and an air of cheerful romance about this little procession of plodding mules and bright-eyed peasants, a feeling of the picturesque, of leisurely labour in sunshine and sweet air, very comforting to a torn heart, wasted by anxiety. If one could but vanish and fade away into those mountain fastnesses and forget, working peacefully by some quiet hearth, under one of those sunlit church towers cresting the pine ridges.