“She prefers a sunset to a flock of goats,” said the gipsies.

What was to be done, Orlando could not think. To leave the gipsies and become once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable. But it was equally impossible to remain forever where there was neither ink nor writing paper, neither reverence for the Talbots nor respect for a multiplicity of bedrooms. So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount Athos, when minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either played her a trick or worked a miracle⁠—again, opinions differ too much for it to be possible to say which. Orlando was gazing rather disconsolately at the steep hillside in front of her. It was now midsummer, and if we must compare the landscape to anything, it would have been to a dry bone; to a sheep’s skeleton; to a gigantic skull picked white by a thousand vultures. The heat was intense, and the little fig tree under which Orlando lay only served to print patterns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous.