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The country for some distance was fertile, and here and there, when one got rid of the poplars, even picturesque. But halfway to Altes on the last day, it altogether changed in character, becoming utterly waste and sterile. Now, as far as the eye could reach, nothing was to be seen on either side of the road, but long stretches of bleak, barren moorland. Hardly, indeed, correctly described by that word, for our northern moors have a decided, though peculiar, beauty of their own, wholly wanting in the great, dead-looking wastes of this part of France, known as “les landes.” To add to the gloomy effect of the scene, a close drizzling rain began to fall, and continued without the slightest break, the whole of that dreary afternoon.

Marion, though neither morbid nor weak-minded, was yet, like all sensitive and refined organisations, keenly alive to the impressions of the outer world. A ray of sudden sunshine; a tiny patch of the exquisitely bright green moss, one sometimes sees amidst a mass of dingy browns and olives; or the coming unexpectedly towards the close of a dusty summer ramble on one of those fairylike wells of coolest, purest water all shaded round by a bower or drooping ferns and bracken,—these, and such things as these caused her to thrill with utterly inexpressible delight. But on the other side she, of necessity, suffered actual pain from trifles which, in coarser natures, waken no sense of jar or discord.