S. Baring-Gould

“ That which draws a crowd in the season to Vals is the baths. But the baths are a mere excuse. The fashion has set in and the crowd follow the fashion.
The river Ardèche, after having ploughed its way through beds of basaltic lava, runs between the prismatic columns as though sweeping through a forest of petrified bulrushes. It emerges above Aubenas into a broad, luxuriant, and well-peopled valley, where white walls smile and glass windows wink in the sun as far down as the eye can reach, and as far up the sides of the hills as folk choose to climb to their homes. ”

“ At the turn of the tide the Black Prince would approach in the gathering darkness and would come as near in as she dare venture. The wind had fallen, but the sea was running, and with the tide setting in she would approach the cove.
Judith hastened toward the Glaze. Darkness had set in, but in the north were auroral lights, first a great, white halo, then rays that shot up to the zenith, and then a mackerel sky of rosy light. The growl and mutter of the sea filled the air with threat like an angry multitude surging on with blood and destruction in their hearts. ”

“ A barbed past can never be cut out of the memory; it leaves behind its fangs, its canker. It may be covered over, and forgotten, but it reasserts itself inevitably, excruciatingly, and the fester begins to ooze forth and the wound to gape.
It was so now. On this piece of chalk he had put his arm round Jane's waist and spoken his love into her ear. There where now lay pebbles and a ribbon of torn weed, there in a crystal pool he had seen her frightened face reflected—and into it her tears had fallen. ”

“ Then Jasper went down by way of the wood with the men scrambling, falling, bursting through the brakes; some cursing when slashed across the face by an oak bough or torn through cloth and skin by a braid of bramble. They were quite invisible to Barbara, and to each other. They went downward: fast they could not go, fearing at every moment to fall over a face of rock; groping, struggling as with snakes, in the coils of wood; slipping, falling, scrambling to their feet again, calling each other, becoming bewildered, losing their direction. ”

“ Drownlands contemplated her steadily. He saw her, in her anguish of mind, twine and untwine her long fingers, then pluck at and strip off chips of the table where he had broken it, put them between her teeth and bite them, but still with lowered brow and eyes that she could not raise for shame. He could see flushes pass over her, succeeded by deadly pallor. It was as though flames were flickering about her head, shooting up and enveloping throat and cheek and brow, then dying down and leaving a deathly cold behind. A soul in this present life was prematurely suffering its purgatory. ”

“ In the midst of this hot, sickly atmosphere of evil, pure souls, like that of Syncletica, stifled. The modest mind of a young girl shrank into itself, like a delicate flower that closes at the rude touch, and died to the world. If she were a heathen, she bent her head, and sickened and faded. If she were a Christian, she found in the shadow of the Church, a fresh spot where she might bloom, fanned by the breezes of Paradise. ”