"I promise to try to do it," cried Dorothy, stretching out her hands toward Margaret, but without touching her. "Philip, let us enter into an agreement to be happy. Let us take each day singly as it comes, and look upon it as a gift straight from God."
Philip did not speak, but Margaret said, as if to herself:
"My God! Thou art all love.
Not one poor minute 'scapes Thy breast
But brings a favor from above."
"I will try to believe it," said Philip; "but there is so much in life that is not good. There are few days and hours like this."
They returned to the quay almost in silence, but not less happy because their happiness had taken a tinge of solemnity. As they landed, and the light of a lamp fell upon Margaret's face, there was a look of serene gladness on it, such as neither Dorothy nor Philip had seen before. It looked to them like the face of an angel, both strong and happy.
CHAPTER XXX.
A MYSTERY.
They started by the earliest train to Victoria, and were half-way to Pieve di Cadore before nightfall, taking great delight, each one of them, in the wonderful beauty of the scenery through which they were traveling. Philip was in that delicious state of convalescence, the last stage of it, when health seems renewed to greater and fresher vigor than before the illness came. He was in high spirits, and in his inmost heart, if he had looked there, he would have discovered no regret that Phyllis was absent. Her presence, charming as it was, with the thousand little attentions she would have demanded from him, would have interfered with the perfect freedom he enjoyed in the companionship of his mother and Dorothy. They exacted nothing from him, and were good travelers, complaining of no discomfort or inconvenience. There was a good deal of discomfort which would have fretted Phyllis considerably. But Dorothy was like a pleasant comrade, whose society added another charm to the picturesque scenery. When Margaret was too tired to leave the carriage, Dorothy was always ready to climb the steep paths with him, by which they escaped the tedious zigzags of the dusty roads.
To Dorothy, accustomed to a low horizon and wide sweep of upland with a broad field of sky above it, the lofty peaks of gray rock rising for thousands of feet into the sky, and hanging over the narrow valleys with a threatening aspect, were at first oppressive. But the profusion of flowers on the nearer slopes, which were in places blue with forget-me-nots and gentians, and yellow with large buttercups, was delightful to her, and she soon lost the sense of oppression.
It was the evening of the second day when they reached Cortina, having crossed the Austrian frontier a few miles from it. They were the first tourists of the season, said the custom-house officer, and would be very welcome. The snow was not yet melted off the strangely shaped rocks, towering upward so precipitously that it could lodge only in the little niches and rough ledges of the surface, tracing with white network the lines scored upon it by alternate frost and sunshine. The valley was more open than those through which they had traveled, and little groups of cottages were dotted about it, and for some distance up the lower slopes of the mountains. The air was sharply cold and nipping, for the sun was gone down behind the high ridge of rock, and they were glad to get inside the hotel, and into the small, bare dining room, which was the only room, except the kitchen, not used as a bedchamber. They intended to stay here for some days, and Margaret, who had written from Venice to Sidney, informing him of their proposed journey, sent Philip to telegraph to him that they had reached Cortina.