was
already basking in the hot sunshine. He had gone to bed the
night before with the fixed intention of leaving by the
earliest morning train, for his first impressions of
Chaudfontaine had not been cheerful ones. It was nearly
midnight when, with his companions, he had crossed the bridge
that connects the railway station with the hotel on the
opposite side of the stream, and scarcely a light was shining
from the windows of the dim white building before him; he was
very tired, rather cross, and disposed to grumble at the delay
in his journey; and the general aspect of things--the bad
supper, the sleepy waiter carrying a candle up flights of
broad shallow wooden stairs, and down a long passage to a
remote room barely furnished, the uncertain view of a
foreground of rustling poplars, and close behind them a black
silent mass of hill--all these had not tended to encourage him.

But a man must be very cynical, or very _blase_, or wholly
possessed by some other uncomfortable quality, who does not
feel much cheered and invigorated by morning sunbeams pouring
into a strange bed-room, and awakening him to new scenes and
unexperienced sensations. Horace Graham was neither cynical
nor _blase_; on the contrary, he was a pleasant-tempered, fresh-
hearted lad of twenty or thereabouts, who only three weeks
before had made his first acquaintance with French gendarmes,
and for the first time had heard children shouting to each
other in a foreign tongue along white-walled, sunshiny,
foreign streets. Three weeks touring in Germany had only
served to arouse in him a passion for travelling and seeing,
for new places and peoples and scenes, that in all his life,
perhaps, would not be satiated; everything was new to him,
everything amused him; and so it happened that, while he was
dressing and studying from his window the view that had been
only obscurely hinted at in the darkness of night before, a
sudden desire came over him to remain where he was for that
day, climb the hills that rose before him, and see what manner
of country lay beyond.

It was still early when, after breakfasting by himself in the
salle-a-manger, he found his way into the garden; no one was
stirring, it seemed deserted; he wandered along the gravel
paths, trod down the tall grass as he crossed the lawn, and
arrived at the confines of the little domain. On two sides it
was bounded by a narrow stream, separating it from the road
beyond; at the angle of the garde