road wound upward among
precipices, and the loquacious coachman attached horrible stories to
every rock and ruin. Each valley seemed to have its own particular
ghost.

Here and there by the roadside stood silent houses not one of which had
an inviting appearance, it would never have occurred to a human soul to
knock at any of them, even at midnight, to ask for a night's lodging.
They were all of them sooty dilapidated shanties, which might easily
have been taken for stables, consisting of a single room in which the
whole family lived, livestock and all. The church often lay far away
from the settlement as if it belonged to two villages equally.

Then the road rose again between bare and barren cliffs, where only here
and there a solitary bush seemed to cling to the rocky wall. There was
no trace of a garden, but here and there was a fenced in space in which
the Roumanians are wont to unload their hay, with a long pole sticking
up in the midst of the hay ricks to prevent the wind from carrying it
away, or else the hay was piled up on the branch of a living tree like a
bird's nest.

Down-pouring mountain streams traversed the path at intervals, over
which never a bridge is built, all cars and coaches must cross by the
fords. From the depths of the wooded mountain slopes was reflected the
blood-red glare of iron works and foundries, and the droaning monotonous
din of the machinery scares away the stillness till it loses itself in
the loud murmuring of the mountain torrents.

At every fresh mile, Henrietta felt how lonely she was in this strange
world, whose giant mountains shut her out from the very prospect of the
familiar places from which she had come and from every possibility of
returning; and whose inhabitants would not even be able to answer her if
she were to ask them: "Which is the way back to my native place?"

They travelled onwards till late at night by the light of the moon.
Hidvar was now close at hand. As the prospect opened out on both sides,
at the turn of a narrow defile, suddenly, like a picture in a black
frame, between two mountain slopes, thickly covered with dark
beech-trees, the castle of Hidvar came full in view, standing lonely and
isolated on the summit of a hill. The mountain torrent shot swiftly down
beneath a shaky bridge. The round moon stood straight over the tower of
the castle, as if it had been impaled on the point of it, and painted
everything with its silvery light, the tower, the