He turned. She was pointing to a hill now full in view ahead of them.
"That cliff . . . you remember—the eagles?"
He laughed as though the question amused him.
"It is very like. Yes, certainly, it is very like. But wait until we open the clump of trees yonder. . . ."
They opened it, and her heart gave a leap. A moment before she had been sure this was the very hill. His laugh had confirmed it. . . . She remembered how, at the foot of it, just such a river as this looped itself through the plain. . . . But, lo! in the opening gap, inch by inch, a long building displayed itself: a mansion, gleaming white, with a pillared front and pillared terraces, rising—terrace on terrace—from the woodland, into which a cascade of water, spouting half-way down the slope, plunged and was lost.
She sat dumb. His eyes were upon her; and he laughed quietly.
"It is yours—as you commanded. See!"
He flung out a hand to the left. She beheld a clearing—an avenue, that ran like a broad ribbon to the summit of a flat-topped rise.
"You demanded sight of the ocean," he was saying, and his voice seemed to lose itself in the beat of the churning paddles. "We cannot see it from here; but from the house—your house—you shall look on it every day. Did you not bid me remove a mountain?"
For the rest of the way she sat as in a dream. One of the M'Lauchlin
lads had produced a cow-horn and was blowing it lustily. . . .
They came to shore by river-stairs of stone, where two servants in the
Vyell livery stood like statues awaiting them.