back, like a twisting serpent.  Over a bed of gravel, white as scattered pearls, the sequined lengths coiled on; and the snake-green water, the strange burnt-coral vegetation like a trail of blood among the pearls, the young foliage of trees, filmy as wisps of blowing gauze, were the only vestiges of colour that the moon allowed to live in the under-world which we had reached.  But above, on the roof of that world—­“les Causses”—­where we had left ice and snow, we could see purple chimneys of rock rising to an opal sky, and now and then a mountain bonfire, like a great open basket of witch-rubies, glowing beneath the moon.

“This is the last haunt of the fairies,” I said under my breath, but the man by my side heard the murmur.

“I thought you’d find that out,” he said.  “Trust you to get telepathic messages from the elf-folk!  Why, this gorge teems with fairy tales and legends of magic, black and white.  The Rhine Valley and the Black Forest together haven’t as many or as wonderful ones.  I should like you to hear the stories from some of the village people or the boatmen.  They believe them to this day.”

“Why, of course,” I said, gravely.  Then, a question wanted so much to be asked, that when I refused it asked itself in a great hurry, before I could even catch it by its lizard-tail.  “Was she with you when you were here before?”

“She?” he echoed.  “I don’t understand.”

“The lady of the battlement garden,” I explained, ashamed and repentant now that it was too late.

He did not answer for a moment.  Then he laughed, an odd sort of laugh.  “Oh, my romance of the battlement garden?  Yes, she was with me in this gorge.  She is with me now.”

“I wonder if she is thinking about you to-night?” I asked, knowing he meant that the mysterious lady was carried along on this journey in his spirit, as I was in the car.

“Not seriously, if at all,” he answered, with what seemed to me a forced lightness.  “But I am thinking of her—­thoughts which she will probably never know.”

Then I did wish that I, too, had a hidden sorrow in my life, a man in the background, but as unlike Monsieur Charretier as possible, for whose love I could call upon my brother’s sympathy.  And I suppose it was because he had some one, while I had no one, in this strange, hidden fairyland like a secret orchard of jewelled fruits, that I felt suddenly very sad.

He pointed out Castlebouc, a spellbound chateau on a towering crag that held it up as if on a tall black finger, above a village which might have fallen off a canvas by Gustave Dore.  Farther on lay a strange place called Prades, memorable for a huge buttress of rock exactly like the carcass of a mammoth petrified and hanging on a wall.  Then, farther on still, over the black face of the rocks flashed a whiteness of waving waters, pouring cascades like bridal veils whose lace was made of mountain snows.