sensation; and it exhausted me."

"Oh! let us talk, let us talk," she said, after a long pause. "I
understand it. No orator was ever more terrible. I think," she
continued, presently, "that I perceive the causes of the harmonies
which surround us. This landscape, which has but three marked colors,
--the brilliant yellow of the sands, the blue of the sky, the even
green of the sea,--is grand without being savage; it is immense, yet
not a desert; it is monotonous, but it does not weary; it has only
three elements, and yet it is varied."

"Women alone know how to render such impressions," I said. "You would
be the despair of a poet, dear soul that I divine so well!"

"The extreme heat of mid-day casts into those three expressions of the
infinite an all-powerful color," said Pauline, smiling. "I can here
conceive the poesy and the passion of the East."

"And I can perceive its despair."

"Yes," she said, "this dune is a cloister,--a sublime cloister."

We now heard the hurried steps of our guide; he had put on his Sunday
clothes. We addressed a few ordinary words to him; he seemed to think
that our mood had changed, and with that reserve that comes of misery,
he kept silence. Though from time to time we pressed each other's
hands that we might feel the mutual flow of our ideas and impressions,
we walked along for half an hour in silence, either because we were
oppressed by the heat which rose in waves from the burning sands, or
because the difficulty of walking absorbed our attention. Like