vaguely prophesied, I felt I could not give up the promised gorges and mountains.
Out of Avignon we slid, past the old, old ramparts and the newer but impressive walls, and turned at the right into the Marseilles road. "Vaucluse!" said a kilometre-stone, and then another and another repeated that enchanted and enchanting word, as we flew onward between the Rhône and the Durance.
This was our own old way again, as far as the Pont de Bonpas; then our road wound to the northeast, away from the world we knew—I said to myself—and into a world of romance, a world created by the love of Petrarch for Laura, and sacred to those two for ever more.
The ruined castle, with machicolated towers and haughty buttresses, on the great rampart of a hill, was for me the porter's lodge at the entrance gate of an enchanted garden, where poetic flowers of love bloomed through seasons and centuries; laurels, roses, and lilies, and pansies for remembrance. We did n't see those flowers with our bodies' eyes, but what of that? What did it matter that to the Turnours in their splendid glass cage this was just a road, with queer little gnome dwellings scooped out of solid rock to redeem it from commonplaceness, with a fringe of deserted cottages farther on, and some ugly brickworks? My spirit's eyes saw the flowers, and they clustered thicker and brighter about Pieverde, where I insisted to Mr. Dane that Laura had been born.
He was inclined to dispute this at first, and bring up the horrid theory that the pure white star of Petrarch's life had been a mere Madame de Sade, with a drove of
