Town and plain and range were the first vista of landscape that she had
seen; doubtless they would be the last. Meanwhile, there was the
horizon. She was particularly fond of looking at it. If you are
seventeen, with a fanciful mind, you can find much information not in
histories or encyclopædias or the curricula of schools in the horizon.

There she had learned that the Roman aristocrat had turned his thumb
down to a lot of barbarian captives because he had a fit of indigestion,
and the next day, when his digestion was better, he had scattered coins
among barbarian children; that Napoleon, who had also gone over the pass
road, was a pompous, fat little man, who did not always wipe his upper
lip clean of snuff when he was on a campaign; that the baron's youngest
daughter had lost her eyesight from a bodkin thrust for telling her
sister, who had her father's temper, that she was developing a double
chin.

For the people of Maria's visions were humanly real to her, and as such
she liked and understood them. If the first Galland were half a robber,
to disguise the fact because he was her ancestor was not playing fair.
It made him only a lay figure of romance.

One or two afternoons a week Colonel Hedworth Westerling, commander of
the regimental post of the Grays on the other side of the white posts,
stretched his privilege of crossing the frontier and appeared for tea at
the Gallands'. It meant a pleasant half-hour breaking a long walk, a
relief from garrison surroundings. Favored in mind and person, favored
in high places, he had become a colonel at thirty-two. People with fixed
ideas as to the appearance of a soldier said that he looked every inch
the commander. He was tall, strong-built, his deep, broad chest
suggesting powerful energy. Conscious of his abilities, it was not