over the wide plain that lay beneath this ragged spur of the Alpilles.  In the distance I could see Avignon, and the pale, opal-tinted, gold-veined hills that fold in the fountain of Vaucluse.  Never, since we came into Provence, had I been able so clearly to realize the wild fascination of her haggard beauty.  “Here Marius stood in his camp,” I thought, “shading his eyes from the fierce sun, and looking out over this strange, arid country for the Barbarians he meant to conquer.”  My heart beat with an intoxicating excitement, such as one feels on seeing great mountains or the ocean for the first time; and then down I tumbled, with a bump, off my pedestal, when Lady Turnour wanted to know what I supposed she’d brought me for, if not to put on her extra cloak without waiting to be told.

Watches are really luxuries, not necessities, with the Turnours, because their appetites always strike the hour of one, and if they’re sometimes a little in advance, they can be relied upon never to be behindhand.  I knew before I glanced at the little bracelet-watch Pamela gave me (hidden under my sleeve) that it must be on the stroke of half-past twelve when her ladyship began to complain of the sharp wind, and say we had better be getting back to St. Remy.  She was cross, as usual when she is hungry, and said that if I continued to go about “like a snail in a dream” whenever she fetched me to carry her things on these short expeditions, she would leave me in the hotel to mend her clothes; whereupon I became actually servile in my ministrations.  I brushed a microscopic speck of dust off her gown; I pushed in a hairpin; I tucked up a flying end of veil; I straightened her toque, and made myself altogether indispensable; for the bare idea of being left behind was a box on the ear.  I could not endure such a punishment—­and the front seat would look so empty, so unfinished, without me!

As we went back down the steep hill from old Glanum, St. Remy appeared a little oasis of spring in the midst of a winter which had come back for something it had forgotten.  All its surrounding orchards and gardens, screened from the shrewish Mistral by the shoulders of the Alpilles, and again by lines of tall cypress trees and netted, dry bamboos, had begun to bloom richly like the earlier gardens on the Riviera.  There was a pinky-white haze of apple blossoms; and even the plane trees in the long main street were hung with dainty, primrose-coloured spheres, like little fairy lanterns.  Not only did every man seem a possible Felibre, but every girl was a beauty.  Some of them wore a charming and becoming head-dress, such as I never saw before, and the chauffeur said it was the head-dress of the women of Arles, where we would go day after to-morrow.