“There! sir!”

After which, she rose, and, still sliding, made her way to an arm-chair, into which she threw herself, and taking up the cure’s three-cornered hat, she began to fan herself vigorously with it.

In the midst of the applause and the laughter that filled the parlor, the Baroness de Pers drew gently nearer to Lucan on the sofa which they were jointly occupying, and said to him in a whisper: 

“Tell me, my dear sir, what in the world is the meaning of this new system?  Do you know that I still preferred the old style myself?”

“How, dear madam?  And why so?” said Lucan simply.

But before the baroness had time to explain, admitting that such was her intention, Julia was taken with another fancy.

“Really,” she said, “I am smothering here.  Monsieur de Lucan, do offer me your arm.”

She went out, and Lucan followed her.  She stopped in the vestibule to cover her head with her great white vail, seemed to hesitate between the door that led into the garden and that which led into the yard, and then deciding: 

“To the Ladies’ Walk,” she said; “it’s coolest there.”

“The Ladies’ Walk,” which was Julia’s favorite strolling resort, opened opposite the avenue, on the other side of the court-yard.  It was a gently sloping path contrived between the rocky base of the wooded hill and the banks of a ravine that seemed to have been one of the moats of the old castle.  A brook flowed at the bottom of this ravine with a melancholy murmur; it became merged, a little farther off, into a small lake shaded by willows, and guarded by two old marble nymphs, to which the Ladies’ Walk was indebted for its name, consecrated by the local tradition.  Half-way between the yard and the pond, fragments of wall and broken arches, the evident remnants of some outer fortification, rose against the hill-side; for the space of a few paces, these ruins bordered the path with their heavy buttresses, and projected into it, together with festoons of ivy and briar, a mass of shade which night changed into densest darkness.  It looked then as if the passage was broken by an abyss.  The gloomy character of this site was not, however, without some mitigating features; the path was strewn with fine, dry sand; rustic benches stood against the bluff; finally, the grassy banks that sloped down into the ravine were dotted with hyacinths, violets, and dwarf roses whose perfume rose and lingered in that shaded alley like the odor of incense in a church.

It was then about the end of July, and the heat had been overpowering during the day.  After leaving the atmosphere of the court-yard, still aglow with the fires of the setting sun, Julia breathed eagerly the cool air of the woods and of the brook.

“Dieu! how delightful this is!” she said.

“But I am afraid this may be a little too delightful,” said Lucan; “allow me.”

And he wound up in a double fold round her neck the floating ends of her vail.