"A Continental tour will do her good," he remarked to me. "We will visit France, Spain, Italy. The glitter of foreign cities will perhaps help to remove her grief. You must come with us, Frank; we shall need you. A young fellow like you will be able to enliven and interest her more than any lady companion could do--certainly more than her old father, who is often prosy and dull, I fear. Being her cousin, you can talk to her with a freedom and an ease that in any other young man would be familiarity. And for heaven's sake try to make her forget her grief. Her sad face and thin wasted figure cut me to the heart. You do not mind giving up Heidelberg for a time?" It would require no great sacrifice on the part of any young man to leave the cloisters of a university in order to escort a beautiful girl through Europe, so I gladly assented to my uncle's proposition, resolving, for my own sake, to try to make Daphne forget her grief. She yielded a willing acquiescence to the project of a Continental tour. Poor girl! She was in so dull and passive a state of mind that if we had proposed a voyage of discovery to the North Pole she would have offered no objection. So, late in March, we left England, and by the end of the summer had signed our names in half the hotel books of Europe. CHAPTER V THE ARTIST PAINTS A NOTABLE PICTURE Night was just fading from the Alpine heights that girdle the quaint old town of Rivoli in the canton of Ticino. Two men, issuing from the entrance of a châlet perched like an eagle's nest on the jutting crag of a mountain far above the valley, paused to admire the grandeur of the scene. These persons were my uncle and myself, and we had risen at this early hour in order to witness that most beautiful of sights in Switzerland, sunrise. From the terrace of the châlet we watched the dim Alpine panorama gradually emerge from the shadowy reign of night. Silent and majestic from out the dark "sea of pines" the mountains arose to view, their icy peaks glittering with rosy-tinted hues in the soft, beautiful light that was now suffusing the sky. "By Jove, what a glorious sight!" I exclaimed enthusiastically. "Yes, for a poet or painter," replied my uncle, who, amid the loveliest scenery of Switzerland, sighed for the shady side of Pall Mall. "That's a pretty little town down there," I continued, gazing at the spires of Rivoli. It lay at our feet in the valley beneath, so far down that it seemed like a toy city. "How the mountains seem to isolate it from the rest of the world! Rivoli? Rivoli?" I muttered. "I have never heard of the place before," unconsciously telling a falsehood. "I suppose it's quite out of the track of the ordinary tourist?" "Quite. We shall not see many specimens of that genus in the everlasting suit of grey tweed." "What's that rough stone building to the right of us?" I said. "There! just by the cascade. A hermit's grotto?"