CHAPTER III.
"HEART BARE, HEART HUNGRY, VERY POOR." Diana Paget left the Kursaal, and walked slowly along the pretty rustic street; now dawdling before a little print-shop, whose contents she knew by heart, now looking back at the great windows of that temple of pleasure which she had just quitted.
"What do they care what becomes of me ?" she thought, as she looked up at the blank vacant windows for the last time before she left the main street of Foretdechene, and turned into a straggling side-street, whose rugged pavement sloped upward towards the pine-clad hills.

The house in which Captain Paget had taken up his abode was a tall white habitation, situated in the narrowest of the narrow by-ways that intersect the main street of the pretty Belgian watering-place; a lane in which the inhabitants of opposite houses may shake hands with one another out of the window, and where the odour of the cabbages and onions so liberally employed in the _cuisine_ of the native offends the nose of the foreigner from sunrise to sunset.
Diana paused for a moment at the entrance to this lane, but, after a brief deliberation, walked onwards.
"What is the use of my going home ?" she thought; "_they_ won't be home for hours to come." She walked slowly along the hilly street, and from the street into a narrow pathway winding upward through the pine-wood.

Here she was quite alone, and the stillness of the place soothed her.

She took off her hat, and slung the faded ribbons across her arm; and the warm breeze lifted the loose hair from her forehead as she wandered upwards.

It was a very beautiful face from which that loose dark hair was lifted by the summer wind.