"Who wouldn't give in to you Henrietta?" Damaris murmured.
Whereupon Mrs. Frayling delicately beamed on her; and, agreeable unanimity of sentiment being thus established, conversation between the two ladies for a while fell silent.
The little chestnut horses, meantime, encouraged with "Oh hè-s" and "Oh là-s" by their driver, trotted and climbed, climbed and trotted, until the woodland lay below and the Signal de la Palu was reached. A wide level space on a crest of the foot-hills--with flag staff bearing the valorous tricolor, and rustic log-built restaurant offering refreshment--opening upon the full splendour of the Maritime Alps.
Damaris stepped out of the carriage, and, patting the near horse on the neck in passing, went forward across the sparse turf, starred with tiny clear coloured flowers, to the edge of the platform.
The Provençal coachman, from his perch on the box-seat of the victoria, his rough-caste crumpled countenance sun-baked to the solid ruddy brown of the soil of his own vineyard, followed her movements with approving glances.--For she was fresh as an opening rose the young English _Mees_, and though most elegant, how agile, how evidently strong!
Innocent of the admiration she excited, Damaris stood absorbed, awed even, by the grandeur of the scene. Many hundred feet below, the rent chasm down which it took its course steeped in violet gloom, the milk-white waters of an ice-fed river impetuously journeyed to the fertile lowlands and the sea. Opposite, across the gorge, amazingly distinct in the pellucid atmosphere, rose the high mountains, the undefiled, untrodden and eternal snows. Azure shadow, transparent, ethereal, haunted them, bringing into evidence enormous rounded shoulder, cirque, crinkled glacier, knife-edge of underlying rock.
They belonged to the deepest the most superb of life, this rent gorge, these mountains--like Faircloth's letter. Would beautiful and noble sights, such as these, always in future give her an ache of longing for the writer of that letter, for the romance, the poetry, of the unacknowledged relation he bore to her? Tears smarted hot in Damaris' eyes, and resolutely, if rather piteously, she essayed to wink them away. For to her it just now seemed, the deepest, the most superb of life was also in great measure the forbidden. The ache must be endured, then, the longing go unsatisfied, since she could only stay the pain of them by doing violence to plain and heretofore fondly cherished, duties.