d with misfortune. I looked upon them
as the victims of fatality. The man was very tall and thin, rather
stooping, with hair perfectly white, too white for his comparatively
youthful physiognomy; and there was in his bearing, and in his person
that austerity peculiar to Protestants. The daughter, who was
probably twenty-four or twenty-five, was small in stature, and was
also very thin, very pale, and she had the air of one who was worn out
with utter lassitude. We meet people like this from time to time who
seem too weak for the tasks and the needs of daily life, too weak to
move about, to walk, to do all that we do every day. This young girl
was very pretty, with the diaphanous beauty of a phantom; and she ate
with extreme slowness, as if she were almost incapable of moving her
arms.

It must have been she assuredly who had come to take the waters.

They found themselves facing me at the opposite side of the table; and
I at once noticed that the father had a very singular nervous spasm.

Every time he wanted to reach an object, his hand made a hook-like
movement, a sort of irregular zigzig, before it succeeded in touching
what it was in search of; and, after a little while, this action was
so wearisome to me that I turned aside my head in order not to see it.

I noticed, too, that the young girl, during meals, wore a glove on her
left hand.

After dinner, I went for a stroll in the park of the thermal
establishment. This led towards the little Auvergnese station of
Chatel Guyot, hidden in a gorge at the foot of the high mountain, of
that mountain from which flow so many boiling springs, arising from
the deep bed of extinct volcanoes. Over there, above us, the domes,
which had once been craters, raised their mutilated heads on the
summit of the long chain. For Chatel Guyot is situated at the spot
where the region of domes begins.

Beyond it, stretches out the region of peaks, and further on again the
region of precipices.

The "Puy de Dome" is the highest of the domes, the Peak of Sancy is
the loftiest of the peaks, and Cantal is the most precipitous of these
mountain-heights.

This evening it was very warm. I walked up and down a shady path, on
the side of the mountain overlooking the park, listening to the
opening strains of the Casino band.

And I saw the father and the daughter advancing slowly in my
direction. I saluted them, as we are accustomed to salute our
hotel-companions at health resorts; and the