The scene of the temptation was to be transferred to the pinnacle of the temple.
"It is not asking too much of you to climb so far for my pleasure?"
"It is our mission to climb," she replied wearily; "and if our strength fails, we rest by the way."
Of herself she spoke literally; for when they came to the topmost story of the building, from which the observatory was reached by a short flight of steps, she sank into a seat placed near as a resting-place.
"Will you go above, Sister?" she said feebly. "I will wait here."
On the way up, also, the old man had been shaking his head with a stupid look of alarm and muttering his disapproval.
"There is a high railing, Ezra," she now said to him, "You could not fall." But he refused to go further; he suffered from vertigo.
The young pair went up alone.
For miles in all directions the landscape lay shimmering in the autumnal sunlight—a poor, rough, homely land, with a few farmhouses of the plainest kind. Briefly she traced for him the boundary of the convent domain. And then he, thinking proudly of his own region, now lying heavy in varied autumnal ripeness and teeming with noble, gentle animal life; with rolling pastures as green as May under great trees of crimson and gold; with flashing streams and placid sheets of water, and great secluded homesteads—he, in turn, briefly described it; and she, loving the sensuous beauty of the world, listened more dreamily, merely repeating over and over, half to herself, and with more guarded courtesy half to him, "It must be very beautiful."
But whether she suddenly felt that she had yielded herself too far to the influence of his words and wished to counteract this, or whether she was aroused to offset his description by another of unlike interest, scarcely had he finished when she pointed towards a long stretch of woodland that lay like a mere wavering band of brown upon the western horizon.