to get every ounce possible of intercourse out of it.—­We quite understand you have luncheon with me on Thursday, don’t we?—­and that you stay and help me through the afternoon.  I am always at home on Thursdays to the neighbours.  They aren’t all of them conspicuously well-bred or exciting; but I have learnt to take the rough with the smooth, the boring along with the gifted and brilliant.  India is a good school in which to learn hospitality.  The practise of that virtue becomes a habit.  And I for one quite refuse to excuse myself from further exercise of it on coming back to Europe.  The General feels with me; and we have laid ourselves out to be civil to our compatriots here at St. Augustin this winter.  A few people were vexatiously stiff and starched at first; but each one of them has given in, in turn.  They really do, I believe, appreciate our little social efforts.”

“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 he-s” and “Oh la-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 Provencal 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.