, and round the church there is a burying-ground,
and skirting the burying-ground there are cloisters, through the
arches and apertures of which they who walk and sit there look down
immediately upon the blue water, and across the water upon the
frowning menaces of Mount Pilate. It is one of the prettiest spots in
that land of beauty; and its charm is to my feeling enhanced by the
sepulchral monuments over which I walk, and by which I am surrounded,
as I stand there. Up here, into these cloisters, Alice and John Grey
went together. I doubt whether he had formed any purpose of doing
so. She certainly would have gone without question in any direction
that he might have led her. The distance from the inn up to the
church-gate did not take them ten minutes, and when they were there
their walk was over. But the place was solitary, and they were alone;
and it might be as well for Mr Grey to speak what words he had to say
there as elsewhere. They had often been together in those cloisters
before, but on such occasions either Mr Palliser or Lady Glencora had
been with them. On their slow passage up the hill very little was
spoken, and that little was of no moment. "We will go in here for a
few minutes," he said. "It is the prettiest spot about Lucerne, and
we don't know when we may see it again." So they went in, and sat
down on one of the embrasures that open from the cloisters over the
lake.

"Probably never again," said Alice. "And yet I have been here now two
years running."

She shuddered as she remembered that in that former year George
Vavasor had been with her. As she thought of it all she hated
herself. Over and over again she had told herself that she had so
mismanaged the latter years of her life that it was impossible for
her not to hate herself. No woman had a clearer idea of feminine
constancy than she had, and no woman had sinned against that idea
more deeply. He gave her time to think of all this as he sat there
looking down upon the water.

"And yet I would sooner live in Cambridgeshire," were the first words
he spoke.

"Why so?"

"Partly because all beauty is best enjoyed when it is sought for with
some trouble and difficulty, and partly because such beauty, and the
romance which is attached to it, should not make up the staple of
one's life. Romance, if it is to come at all, should always come by
fits and starts."

"I should like to live in a pretty country."

"And would like to live a romantic lif