The next morning Grace came down to breakfast, modest, cheerful, charming.  Mark made her breakfast with them; gave her endless letters of recommendation; wanted to take her to see old Doctor Thurnall, which she declined, and then sent her to the station in his own carriage, paid her fare first-class to town, and somehow or other contrived, with Mary’s help, that she should find in her bag two ten-pound notes, which she had never seen before.  After which he went out to his counting-house, only remarking to Mary—­

“Very extraordinary young woman, and very handsome, too.  Will make some man a jewel of a wife, if she don’t go mad, or die of the hospital fever.”

To which Mary fully assented.  Little she guessed, and little did her father, that it was for Grace’s sake that Tom had refused her hand.

A few days more, and Grace Harvey also had gone Eastward Ho.

CHAPTER XXVII.

A RECENT EXPLOSION IN AN ANCIENT CRATER.

It is, perhaps, a pity for the human race in general, that some enterprising company cannot buy up the Moselle (not the wine, but the river), cut it into five-mile lengths, and distribute them over Europe, wherever there is a demand for lovely scenery.  For lovely is its proper epithet; it is not grand, not exciting—­so much the better; it is scenery to live and die in; scenery to settle in, and study a single landscape, till you know every rock, and walnut-tree, and vine-leaf by heart:  not merely to run through in one hasty steam-trip, as you now do, in a long burning day, which makes you not “drunk”—­but weary—­“with excess of beauty.”  Besides, there are two or three points so superior to the rest, that having seen them, one cares to see nothing more.  That paradise of emerald, purple, and azure, which opens behind Treis; and that strange heap of old-world houses at Berncastle, which have scrambled up to the top of a rock to stare at the steamer, and have never been able to get down again—­between them, and after them, one feels like a child who, after a great mouthful of pine-apple jam, is condemned to have poured down its throat an everlasting stream of treacle.

So thought Stangrave on board the steamer, as he smoked his way up the shallows, and wondered which turn of the river would bring him to his destination.  When would it all be over?  And he never leaped on shore more joyfully than he did at Alf that afternoon, to jump into a carriage, and trundle up the gorge of the Issbach some six lonely weary miles, till he turned at last into the wooded caldron of the Romer-kessel, and saw the little chapel crowning the central knoll, with the white high-roofed houses of Bertrich nestling at its foot.