She had drawn back the curtains and pulled up the shade, and now she threw open the shutters.
Palma came to the window and looked out.
Oh! what a glorious sight! Yet, to be graphic, I must compare great things to small, or at least illustrate the former by the latter. The house from which she looked seemed now to be situated in the bottom of a vast, deep, bowl-shaped valley, its colors now, in midwinter, dark green, with gleams of snow-white, the whole canopied by deep blue, flushed in the east by opal shades of rose, gold, violet, and emerald. The mountains loomed all around in a circle of irregular peaks, all thickly covered with pines, cedars, spruce and other evergreen trees, which grew closest at the base and thinnest near the tops, which were mostly bare, and now, in December, covered, with snow.
Looking from the front window of her room Palma could see but half the circle—the eastern half, made beautiful now by the rising sun. The sun had not yet come in sight; but even as Palma gazed he suddenly sparkled up from behind the cliffs, gilding all the opal hues of morning with dazzling splendor.
“Oh, what a happiness to live in a home like this!” she said to herself; “how good one ought to be to become half worthy of it! Oh, my! oh, my!”
She heard voices speaking below her window. In the clearness of the atmosphere she recognized them as her husband’s and his uncle’s.
The former was saying:
“Why, they are not a bit afraid of you! They seem to know you.”
“Oh, yes! they do.”
And the speakers became silent.