It was hard to do this; and there was a glamour in the very topographical and meteorological environment.  The autumn was a long delight in which the constant sea, the constant sky, knew almost as little variance as the unchanging Alps.  The days passed in a procession of sunny splendor, neither hot nor cold, nor of the temper of any determinate season, unless it were an abiding spring-time.  The flowers bloomed, and the grass kept green in a reverie of May.  But one afternoon of January, while Lanfear was going about in a thin coat and panama hat, a soft, fresh wind began to blow from the east.  It increased till sunset, and then fell.  In the morning he looked out on a world in which the spring had stiffened overnight into winter.  A thick frost painted the leaves and flowers; icicles hung from pipes and vents; the frozen streams flashed back from their arrested flow the sun as it shone from the cold heaven, and blighted and blackened the hedges of geranium and rose, the borders of heliotrope, the fields of pinks.  The leaves of the bananas hung limp about their stems; the palms rattled like skeletons in the wind when it began to blow again over the shrunken landscape.

VI

The caprice of a climate which vaunted itself perpetual summer was a godsend to all the strangers strong enough to bear it without suffering.  For the sick an indoor life of huddling about the ineffectual fires of the south began, and lasted for the fortnight that elapsed before the Riviera got back its advertised temperature.  Miss Gerald had drooped in the milder weather; but the cold braced and lifted her, and with its help she now pushed her walks farther, and was eager every day for some excursion to the little towns that whitened along the shores, or the villages that glimmered from the olive-orchards of the hills.  Once she said to Lanfear, when they were climbing through the brisk, clear air:  “It seems to me as if I had been here before.  Have I?”

“No.  This is the first time.”

She said no more, but seemed disappointed in his answer, and he suggested:  “Perhaps it is the cold that reminds you of our winters at home, and makes you feel that the scene is familiar.”

“Yes, that is it!” she returned, joyously.  “Was there snow, there, like that on the mountains yonder?”

“A good deal more, I fancy.  That will be gone in a few days, and at home, you know, our snow lasts for weeks.”

“Then that is what I was thinking of,” she said, and she ran strongly and lightly forward.  “Come!”

When the harsh weather passed and the mild climate returned there was no lapse of her strength.  A bloom, palely pink as the flowers that began to flush the almond-trees, came upon her delicate beauty, a light like that of the lengthening days dawned in her eyes.  She had an instinct for the earliest violets among the grass under the olives; she was first to hear the blackcaps singing in the garden-tops;