"Every one always thinks any one or anything that they can't understand, crazy. Mrs. Ray thinks me crazy, and it's very difficult for me not to consider her so."
"Alva!"
"Yes, really."
"I'll try to consider you sane."
"Thank you very much, dear." She smiled brightly. "Oh, Lassie, it's such joy to have you to speak to. I was so choked and crowded with thoughts before you came. It was so blessedly good that if I could not stay with him, I could come to this quiet spot and have the house and you to help me wait the days away. You see, Lassie, one has to be part body in spite of everything, and it's so hard to keep your body up to your soul. Sometimes it seems to me that all of a sudden I am drawn into a whirlpool and cannot get hold of anything solid. I don't know just what it is, but I imagine that I feel as they say the Saxons felt when they saw the comet flaming in the year of the Conquest, that something portends. And it seems to me so hard that I could not have stayed with him. But they wouldn't hear to that."
Lassie pressed her hand. "I don't wonder at the way you feel," she said, sympathetically; "there must be so much that is hard in your mind these days."
"Words are poor to tell what I feel," said her friend; "that is what binds me to him,—it is that he and I do not need to speak. We can feel without translation."
"I wonder if I shall ever be loved like that," Lassie murmured wistfully, and at her words the delicate flame illumined her face again.
Alva did not notice; she was looking down into the cleft beneath, and watching the little river fret itself into foam and spray.
"Look!" she said suddenly. "Isn't it lovely in the noon sunlight? Fancy the countless centuries on centuries that it must have taken the river to cut itself this path. There was once a great lake on the other side—the side above the bridge—and it is with the idea of restoring that lake that the State is having this survey made. The difficulty is that the State isn't geologist enough to know that the lake's outlet flowed out there to our left, and that this river is comparatively a new thing. If they remade the lake, the lake would be desperately likely to remake its old outlet."