"I only know it's called Sweetheart Abbey."
"The Countess Devorgilla built it as a shrine for her husband's heart, which was embalmed and buried on her breast. It's a moving story, when one thinks of what she undertook. Galloway was then, for the most part, a savage waste; skilled workmen must be brought from somewhere else, perhaps from Italy or France. Then there is only granite, which could not be cut and molded, on these hills, and the soft red stone had to be carried down the Firth and across the sands. They had no mechanical transport, and you can see the size of the blocks. In spite of all this, the abbey rose and still stands, marked, I often think, by a tender, elusive beauty that's peculiar to the North."
Elsie moved back to where the sun shone down into the roofless nave, and Whitney thought he understood why she did so. Her imagination was fastidiously refined: she would not loiter talking by Devorgilla's tomb. Standing silent beside her, he waited, with a faint smile. He was not a sentimentalist trying to play up to a pretty girl; somehow, she had stirred him. He felt that she had the gift of seizing what was true in romance and missing what was false. Then, she had the strange elusive beauty of the North which she had spoken of: an ethereal tenderness that flashed out and vanished, leaving the hard rock of a character steadfast as the granite upon the Solway shore.
Elsie turned and looked east with grave, steady eyes.
"One reaches out for something that's on the other side," she said; "but perhaps when one knocks and the gate is opened, one goes through unawares—"
"You mean, that when one's eyes are opened, there may not be much difference between the land of enchantment and ours?"
"Something like that."
During the short silence that followed, Whitney looked round the great church that was still majestic in its decay.
"Well," he said, "there can't be many of us, nowadays, who'd deserve the love and labor this place must have cost."
"But there must be some," she insisted.