"What a place for plays!"
"Or for a little children's school, ranged in rows, one above another."
"The man who built it must have dreamt it first!"
These were the exclamations that they made to each other as they passed through, exploring.
There was a great number of bedrooms, divided off here and there; the upper front was one row of them with a gallery running across the house, in whose windows toward the south hung the old red woolen draperies and the bird-cage.
Below, at the back, the last room opened by a door upon a high, flat table of the rock, around whose overhanging edge a light railing had been run. Standing here, they looked up and down the beautiful gorge, into the heart of the hill and the depth of its secret shaded places on the one hand, and on the other into the rush and whirl of the rapidly descending and broken torrent to where it flung itself off the sudden brink, and changed into white mist and an everlasting song.
"This last room ought to be a chapel," said Mr. Kirkbright. "Out here could be open-air service in the beautiful weather, to the sound of that continual organ."
"You have thought of it, too," exclaimed Desire.
"Of what?" asked Mr. Kirkbright, turning toward her.
"Of what you might make this place."