"My dear Mona!" exclaimed her aunt, "it looks dreadfully dangerous. You must not think of it. A footpath half-way down a precipice!"
"It must be a horse-track," said Mona, "or we should not see it so distinctly from here. Certainly the least I owe you is not to run into any unnecessary danger; and I assure you, you may trust me. Do you see that cottage at the end of the path close to the Jördalsnut? When I get there, I will wave my large silk handkerchief. Perhaps you will see it if you are still here. Au revoir!" She kissed her aunt's dainty ringed hand, and set off at a good walking pace.
She had already made enquiry respecting the shortest way to the Jördalsnut, and she found it now without much difficulty. For half a mile or so it lay along the beaten road, and then turned off into the fields. From these, she passed into a straggling copse of stunted trees and tangled undergrowth, and emerged suddenly and unexpectedly on the brink of a deep gorge. Away down below, brawled and tumbled a foaming swollen tributary of the river, and Mona saw, with some uneasiness, that a plank without any kind of handrail did duty for a bridge.
"Now's your chance, my dear girl," she said; "if you mean to keep your head in a case of life and death, or in a big operation—keep it now!"
She gave herself a second to make up her mind—not another in which to think better of it—and then walked steadily across.
"After all, there was no danger for anybody one degree removed from an idiot," she said, with characteristic contempt for an achievement the moment it had passed from the region of posse into that of esse.
But it was with renewed energy that she climbed the opposite side of the gorge and mounted the steep stony path that brought her out on the open hillside. Now that she was actually among them, the mountains towered about her in awful silence. The sky above and the river below seemed alike distant. The sun had gone down, and she stood there all alone in the midst of barren immensity. She took off her hat, tossed back the hair from her heated forehead, and laughed softly.
But she was only now at the beginning of the walk she had planned, and there was no time to lose. The path was, as she had thought, a horse-track, and the walk involved no danger, so long as one did not too entirely lose sight of one's footing in the grandeur of the surroundings. Once she was almost startled by the sudden appearance of a man a few yards in front of her, a visitor at the hotel, probably, for he lifted his hat as he passed.
"Of all the hundreds who are passing through Stalheim to-day," she thought, "only one takes the trouble to come along here, out of the eternal rush of kariols. What do they come to Norway for?"
Every step of the walk was keen enjoyment. She had never allowed herself to get out of touch with nature. "The 'man' shall not 'perceive it die away,'" she had said in the confidence of youth. "Nature is jealous, I know, but she shall receive no cause of offence from me. She was my first friend, and she shall be my last."