nd, 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