"Will it be quite safe for her to go alone?" asked Mrs. Gartney.
"I'll ask Aunt Faith to let me have Glory. She showed me the walk last summer. It is fair she should see this, now."
So the morning odds and ends were done up quickly at Cross Corners and at the Old House, and then Faith and Glory set forth together—the latter in as sublime a rapture as could consist with mortal cohesion.
The common roadside was an enchanted path. The glittering rime transfigured the very cart ruts into bars of silver; and every coarse weed was a fretwork of beauty.
"Bells on their toes" they had, this morning, assuredly; each footfall made a music on the sod.
Over the slippery bridge—out across a stretch of open meadow, and then along a track that skirted the border of a sparse growth of trees, projecting itself like a promontory upon the level land—round its abrupt angle into a sweep of meadow again, on whose farther verge rose the Pasture Rocks.
Behind these rocks swelled up gently a slope, half pasture, half woodland—neither open ground nor forest; but, although clear enough for comfortable walking, studded pretty closely with trees that often interlaced their branches overhead, and made great, pillared aisles, among whose shade, in summer, wound delicious little footpaths that all came out together, midway up, into—what you shall be told of presently.
Here, among and beyond the rocks, were oaks, and pines, and savins—each needle-like leaf a shimmering lance—each clustering branch a spray of gems—and the stout, spreading limbs of the oaks delineating themselves against the sky above in Gothic frost-work.
Suddenly—before they thought it could be so near—they came up and out into a broader opening. Between two rocks that made, as it were, a gateway, and around whose bases were grouped sentinel evergreens, they came into this wider space, floored with flat rock, the surface of a hidden ledge, carpeted with crisp mosses in the summer, whose every cup and hollow held a jewel now—and inclosed with lofty oaks and pines, while, straight beyond, where the woods shut in again far closer than below, rose a bold crag, over whose brow hung pendent birches that in their icy robing drooped like glittering wings of cherubim above an altar.
All around and underneath, this strange magnificence. Overhead, the everlasting Blue, that roofed it in with sapphire. In front, the rough, gigantic shrine.