The envelop had been cut open.  Lewis took out the many sheets and searched them for a sign.  None was there.  He looked again at the envelop.  Across it was stamped a notice of non-delivery on account of deficient address.  Then his eyes fell on faint writing in pencil under a postmark.  He recognized the halting handwriting of Dom Francisco’s eldest girl.  “She is gone,” she had written.  Nothing more.

“Gone?” questioned Lewis.  “Gone where?  Where could Natalie go?” He read parts of his letter over, and blushed at his enthusiasms of almost a year ago.  Almost a year!  Leighton called him.  He tore up the letter and threw it away.  It was time to start.  Then had come the good-by to Cellette, and after that the wonders of the road had held his mind in a constantly renewing grip.  They still held it.

Leighton was beyond being a guide.  He was a companion.  When he could, he avoided big cities and monuments.  He loved to stop for the night at wayside inns where the accommodations were meager, but ample opportunity was given for a friendly chat with the hostess cook.  And if the inn was one of those homely evening meeting-places for old folks, he would say: 

“Lew, no country wears its heart on its sleeve, but ’way inside.  Let us live here a little while and feel the pulse of France.”

When they crossed the border, he sat down under the first shade tree and made Lewis sit facing him.

“This,” he said gravely, “is an eventful moment.  You have just entered a strange country where cooks have been known to fry a steak and live.  There are people that eat the steaks and live.  It is a wonderful country.  Their cooks are also generally ignorant of the axiomatic mission of a dripping-pan, as soggy fowls will prove to you.  But what we lose in pleasing alimentation, we make up in scenery and food for thought.  Collectively, this is the greatest people on earth; individually, the smallest.  Their national life is the most communal, the best regulated, the nearest socialistic of any in the world, and—­they live it by the inch.”

One afternoon, after a long climb through an odorous forest of red-stemmed pines, with green-black tops stretching for miles and miles in an unbroken canopy, they came out upon a broad view that entranced with its sense of illusion.  Cities, like bunched cattle, dotted the vast plain.  Space and the wide, unhindered sweep of the eye reduced their greatness to the dimensions of toy-land.

Leighton and Lewis stood long in silence, then they started down the road that clung to the steep incline.  On the left it was overhung by the forest; on the right, earth fell suddenly away in a wooded precipice.  As the highway clung to the mountain-side, so did quaint villages cling to the highway.  They came to an old Gasthaus, the hinder end of which was buttressed over the brink of the valley.

Here they stopped.  Their big, square room, the only guest-chamber of the little inn, hung in air high above the jumbled roofs of Duerkheim.  To the right, the valley split to form a niche for a beetling, ruined castle.  Far out on the plain the lights of Darmstadt and Mannheim began to blink.  Beyond and above them Heidelberg signaled faintly from the opposing hills.