She stopped in the vestibule to cover her head with her great white vail, seemed to hesitate between the door that led into the garden and that which led into the yard, and then deciding: "To the Ladies' Walk," she said; "it's coolest there." "The Ladies' Walk," which was Julia's favorite strolling resort, opened opposite the avenue, on the other side of the court-yard.

It was a gently sloping path contrived between the rocky base of the wooded hill and the banks of a ravine that seemed to have been one of the moats of the old castle.

A brook flowed at the bottom of this ravine with a melancholy murmur; it became merged, a little farther off, into a small lake shaded by willows, and guarded by two old marble nymphs, to which the Ladies' Walk was indebted for its name, consecrated by the local tradition.
Half-way between the yard and the pond, fragments of wall and broken arches, the evident remnants of some outer fortification, rose against the hill-side; for the space of a few paces, these ruins bordered the path with their heavy buttresses, and projected into it, together with festoons of ivy and briar, a mass of shade which night changed into densest darkness.

It looked then as if the passage was broken by an abyss.

The gloomy character of this site was not, however, without some mitigating features; the path was strewn with fine, dry sand; rustic benches stood against the bluff; finally, the grassy banks that sloped down into the ravine were dotted with hyacinths, violets, and dwarf roses whose perfume rose and lingered in that shaded alley like the odor of incense in a church.
It was then about the end of July, and the heat had been overpowering during the day.