, and I saw him
speed off to the Club House."

"I had thus left two cards on Farrell, and it was now his turn to
call: which he duly did, and next day; not, however, at the
Grand Hotel, but at a far more romantic place of entertainment.

"If you don't know this place--and I do not commend it to you for
entertainment towards the close of the English season--let me
tell you that, walking south from the town by paths that lead
around the curves of the foreshore, you quickly lose Biarritz
and find yourself in a deserted and melancholy country,--a sort
of blasted heath that belongs to a fairy-tale. The great
military road for Spain runs hidden, pretty wide on your left,
among the lower foothills of the Pyrenees: and from it these
foothills undulate down and drop over little cliffs to form a
moorland with patches of salt marish. In spring, they tell me,
the ground is all gay with scarlet anemones in sheets; but, when
I took the path, their glory was over and but a few late flowers
lingered. I happen, however, to like flowers for their scent
more than for their colour: and the whole of this moor was a
spilth of scent from bushes of the purple Daphne--its full
flowering time over, but its scent lingering ghostlily on the
salt wind from the sea. And the sea was forlorn as it always is
in this inner bight of the Bay of Biscay, where no ships have
any business and your whole traffic is a fishing-boat or two, or
a thread of smoke out on the horizon. You are alone between sea
and mountains; and all along the strip that separates them,
while the sky is spring, the land and the sense of it are
autumn.

"Now I don't know the history of it, but can only guess that once
on a time some enterprising speculator, fired by the sudden
Third-Empire blaze of Biarritz, conceived the project of
starting a rival watering place, here to the South, and that
they were to make its beginning with a colossal Hotel. At any
rate, here, rounding a desolate point of the foreshore, I came
upon a long desolate beach, and a long desolate building,
magnificent of facade, new and yet ruinated, fronting the Bay
with a hundred empty eye-sockets.

"It broke on the view with a shock. It made me glance over my
shoulder to make sure of the real Biarritz not far behind.