On one side vineyards clothed the warm red slopes, and rose in steps from the valley to the white buildings of a convent.

On the other the stream wound through green flats where the black cattle stood knee- deep in grass, watched by wild-eyed and half-naked youths.

Again the travellers lost sight of the Loir, and crossing a shoulder, rode through the dim aisles of a beech-forest, through deep rustling drifts of last year's leaves.

And out again and down again they passed, and turning aside from the gateway, trailed along beneath the brown machicolated wall of an old town, from the crumbling battlements of which faces half-sleepy, half-suspicious, watched them as they moved below through the glare and heat.

Down to the river-level again, where a squalid anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them, and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the hour of Nones.
And still he said nothing, and she, cowed by his mysterious gaiety, yet spurning herself for her cowardice, was silent also.