Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/151

 stopped a moment, and we changed places. She put the car at its highest speed, and we flew along the infinite perspective of the never-ending avenue. This vast pine forest is a desert, and we passed only through small and scattered villages. That flight through the pine forest of the Landes will always be to me an ineffaceable memory. None of us spoke; two of us felt, I think, that we were close to Nature's heart. The heady, balsamic odour of the pines exhilarated us, and the wind, playing melancholy music on the Eolian harps of their branches, seemed like a deep accompaniment to the humming throb of the tireless motor. As often as I dared I stole a look sideways at Miss Randolph's profile. She sat erect, her little gauntletted hands resting light as thistledown upon the wheel, but her fingers and her wrist nervous and alert as a jockey riding a thoroughbred, her eyes intent on the long, straight road before her, and a look almost of rapture upon her face.

We had raced silently through the forest for nearly an hour, when, mingling with the balsam of the pines there came a pungent odour of ozone floating from open blue spaces beyond the sombre girdle of the pines. Miss Randolph threw at me a questioning glance. "It must be the sea," I answered, and in a few moments more, after passing through the ancient town of La Teste, we came out upon the edge of a vast lagoon, semicircular, the distant shores almost lost in an indistinct blue haze. "The Bassin d'Arcachon. I said" [sic] Still, no town was visible, only the great expanse of landlocked sea, its shore dotted