defile, as it was quite shady,
they agreed to walk.

In some places huge masses impended over them, of varied form and
colour, without any vegetation but scattered mosses; in others, aromatic
plants and low shrubs; the lavender, the thyme, the rosemary, the
mountain sage, fringed the steep craggs, while a neighbouring aclivity
was shaded with the taller growth of holly, phillyrea, and ever-green
oak; and the next covered with the glowing purple of the Mediterranean
heath. The summits of almost all, crowned with groves of fir, larch, and
pine.

Emmeline in silent admiration beheld this beautiful and singular scene;
and with the pleasure it gave her, a soft and melancholy sensation was
mingled. She wanted to be alone in this delightful place, or with some
one who could share, who could understand the satisfaction she felt.
She knew nobody but Godolphin who had taste and enthusiasm enough to
enjoy it.

Insensibly she left Lady Westhaven and the Chevalier behind her; and
passing his Lordship and the Baron, who were deeply engaged in a
discourse about the military operations of the past war, she walked on
with some quickness. Intent on the romantic wildness of the cliffs with
which she was surrounded, and her mind associating with these objects
the idea of him on whom it now perpetually dwelt, she had brought
Godolphin before her, and was imagining what he would have said had he
been with her; with what warmth he would enjoy, with what taste and
spirit point out, the beauty of scenes so enchanting!

She had now left her companions at some distance; yet as she heard their
voices swell in the breeze along the defile, she felt no apprehension.
In the narrowest part of it, where she saw only steep craggs and the
sky, which their bending tops hardly admitted, she was stopped by a
transparent stream, which bursting suddenly with some violence out of
the rock, is received into a small reservoir of stone and then carried
away in stone channels to a village at some distance.

While Emmeline stood contemplating this beautiful spring, she beheld, in
an excavation in the rock close to it, two persons sitting on a bench,
which had been rudely cut for the passenger to rest. One of them
appeared to be a man about fifty; he wore a short, light coloured coat,
a waistcoat that had once been of embroidered velvet; from his head,
which was covered first with a red thrum night-cap, and then with a
small hat, bound with tarnished lace, depended an immense _queüe_; his
face, tho' thin