“Let us get out and race it,” suggested Catalina; but she spoke with the accent of indolent content, and hung over the door of the leisurely train, giving no heed beyond a polite nod to the nervous protests of Mrs. Moulton. That good lady, surrounded by air-cushions, which the various members of her attentive family distended at stated intervals, had propped herself in a corner, determined to let no expression of fatigue escape her, and enjoying herself in her own fashion. The material discomforts of travel certainly overbalanced the æsthetic delights, but, at least, she was seeing the Europe she had dreamed of so ardently in her youth. Jane sat in another corner reading a volume of Pater. It was impossible to turn her back on the scenery, for the seats ran from east to west and they were travelling due south, but she could ignore it, and that she did. They were in a large, open car furnished with wooden seats and a door for each aisle. The carriage was not dirty, and all the windows were open; moreover, it harbored, so far, no natives beyond two nuns and a priest, who ate cherries continually and talked all at once with the rapidity of ignited fire-crackers and with no falling inflection. The Moultons had taken possession of the last compartment and sat with their backs to the wall, but Catalina, disdaining such poor apology for comfort, had the next to herself, and when not hanging over the door rambled back and forth. Mr. Moulton and Lydia alternately read Baedeker and leaned forward with exclamations of approval. But although Catalina had responded amiably to Lydia’s expression of contempt for Spanish methods of transit, the ambling train suited her less energetic nature and enabled her to study the country that had mothered her own. She stared hard at the blue and tumbled masses of the Pyrenees with their lofty fields of snow glittering in a delicate mist, the same frozen solitude through which Hannibal marched two thousand years ago, longing, perhaps, for the hot, brown plain of Ampurdan below and the familiar murmur of the bright waters that rimmed it. The sun was hot, and all that quivering world of blue shimmered and sparkled and coquetted as if life and not death were its bridegroom. But the Mediterranean, like other seas, is a virago at heart and only dances and sways like a Spanish beauty when out where there is naught to oppose her; for centuries she has been snarling and clawing the rocky head-lands, her white fangs never failing to capture their daily morsel, and never content.