accent, so to speak. But then, surely, all the finer influences of
every language depend mostly on accent; and he has but to think of it
as Gaston actually lived in it to find a singularly companionable
soul there. Gaston, at least, needed but to go far enough across it
for those inward oppositions to cease, which already at times beset
him; to feel at one with himself again, under the influence of a
scene which had for him something of the character of the sea--its
changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life
that traversed it. Featureless, if you will, it was always under the
guidance of its ample sky. Scowling back sometimes moodily enough,
but almost never without a remnant of fine weather, about August it
was for the most part cloudless. And then truly, under its blue
dome, the great plain would as it were "laugh and sing," in a kind of
absoluteness of sympathy with the sun.



II. OUR LADY'S CHURCH

"I had almost said even as they."

[26] Like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, thought the child,
everywhere the great church of Chartres was visible, with the passing
light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces. The people
of La Beauce were proud, and would talk often of its rich store of
sacred furniture, the wonder-working relics of "Our Lady under the
Earth," and her sacred veil or shift, which kings and princes came to
visit, returning with a likeness thereof, replete in miraculous
virtue, for their own wearing. The busy fancy of Gaston, multiplying
this chance hearsay, had set the whole interior in array--a dim,