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day, when her household duties were done, Gilberte walked in her garden. This was her hour of recreation. But a sweeter hour followed, which she allotted to dreaming.

High up, on the left, on a jutting promontory, was a clearing where stood the ruins of a little summer-house. The view from here extended, over undulating plains, to the dark heights of Mortain. On the right, the other side of the valley was a wall of red rocks, clad in broom and fir-trees. It was a landscape of illimitable distances and, at the same time, tender and familiar through the homeliness of this little glen, a landscape which had all the wild and rugged poetry of a Breton moor. ...

The daylight waned early in those winter