Not until the top of the hill was reached, and the car swung around the broad curve of the driveway, did the full beauty of the panorama before her burst on Margaret’s eyes. She gave a low cry of delight.
“Oh, how beautiful—how wonderfully, wonderfully beautiful!” she exclaimed.
Her eyes were on the silver sheen of the river trailing along the green velvet of the valley far below—she had turned her back on the red-roofed town with its smoking chimneys.
The sun was just setting when a little later she walked across the lawn to where a rustic seat marked the abrupt descent of the hill. Far below the river turned sharply. On the left it flowed through a cañon of many-windowed walls, and under a pall of smoke. On the right it washed the shores of flowering meadows, and mirrored the sunset sky in its depths.
So absorbed was Margaret in the beauty of the scene that she did not notice the figure of a man coming up the winding path at her left. Even Ned Spencer himself did not see the girl until he was almost upon her. Then he stopped short, his lips breaking into a noiseless “Well, by Jove!”
A twig snapped under his foot at his next step, and the girl turned.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said absorbedly. “I couldn’t wait. I came right out to see it,” she finished, her eyes once more on the valley below. The brothers, at first glance, looked wonderfully alike, and Margaret had unhesitatingly taken Ned to be Frank.
Ned did not speak. He, too, like his sister an hour before, had fallen under the spell of a pair of wondrous blue eyes.
“It seems to me,” said the girl, slowly, “that nothing in the world would ever trouble me if I had that to look at.”
“It seems so to me, too,” agreed Ned—but he was not looking at the view.