ad not even any very definite desires. He had felt the
impulse to come back to Europe, and he had obeyed it; but now that he
had arrived, his impulse seemed to have little more to say to him. He
perceived it, indeed--mentally--in the attitude of a small street-boy
playing upon his nose with that vulgar gesture which is supposed to
represent the elation of successful fraud. There was a large blank wall
before his window, painted a dirty yellow and much discolored by the
weather; a broad patch of summer sunlight rested upon it and brought
out the full vulgarity of its complexion. Bernard stared a while at
this blank wall, which struck him in some degree as a symbol of his
own present moral prospect. Then suddenly he turned away, with the
declaration that, whatever truth there might be in symbolism, he, at any
rate, had not come to Europe to spend the precious remnant of his youth
in a malodorous Norman sea-port. The weather was very hot, and neither
the hotel nor the town at large appeared to form an attractive sejour
for persons of an irritable nostril. To go to Paris, however, was hardly
more attractive than to remain at Havre, for Bernard had a lively vision
of the heated bitumen and the glaring frontages of the French capital.
But if a Norman town was close and dull, the Norman country was
notoriously fresh and entertaining, and the next morning Bernard got
into a caleche, with his luggage, and bade its proprietor drive him
along the coast. Once he had begun to rumble through this charming
landscape, he was in much better humor with his situation; the air was
freshened by a breeze from the sea; the blooming country, without walls
or fences, lay open to the traveller's eye; the grain-fields and copses
were shimmering in the summer wind; the pink-faced cottages peeped
through the ripening orchard-boughs, and the gray towers of the old
churches were silvered by the morning-light of France.

At the end of some three hours, Bernard arrived at a little
watering-place which lay close upon the shore, in the embrace of a
pair of white-armed cliffs. It had a quaint and primitive aspect and a
natural picturesqueness which commended it to Bernard's taste. There was
evidently a great deal of nature about it, and at this moment, nature,
embodied in the clear, gay sunshine, in the blue and quiet sea, in the
daisied grass of the high-shouldered downs, had an air of inviting the
intelligent observer to postpone his difficulties. Blanqu