"Indiana, stop that! Lord Canning, will you hold her?"
"Allow me," said Lord Canning, putting his arms about her and bending himself to gaze down into the falls.
Their tremendous rush and power awoke a responsive chord in his own breast. He was conscious that what had been first an impulse with him was rapidly becoming a force, as wildly impetuous in its way as that upon which he was gazing.
In one part of the glen some logs had been stacked under the trees. Lord Canning secured one. "I wish to test the force of the water," he said. It took all the strength he possessed to raise the log high in the air and fling it down into the falls. There, it was lifted and tossed by the eddying current, then whirled onward, out of sight, as though it had been a leaf. "Tremendous power! Miss Stillwater, you have gazed long enough into the witches' cauldron."
They ascended slowly, behind Mrs. Bunker and Lord Stafford.
"Let us rest a little while," said Lord Canning. "I should like to sit in this mysterious glen and listen to the falls as we hear them now—on the bridge they were too deafening."
They sat down beneath one of the immense pines, which looked down on the falls. Lord Canning closed his eyes and leaned back on the deep green moss. It was a spot where the sun seldom penetrated. "I christen these the Magic Falls," he said, after a few moments, in which Indiana idly plucked the moss. "Listening to them one loses all sense of past or future. Here, just before we reach the falls—but in view of them, within sound of them, before we are carried away by their impetuous rush, rendered dizzy and blinded by their thunder and spray—one can rest. This is one of life's lulls. We all deserve to rest one day in a spot like this, deeply shaded and carpeted with moss, within sound of the Magic Falls. Here the world stops, for once,—the world, with all its pros and cons, its clear and valuable logic, of which one grows very weary. The world itself must tire sometime of its plentiful stock of common sense. Then, I christen this The World's Rest."
CHAPTER IX.
In an Orchard of the Memory
When Lord Canning and Indiana finally rejoined the others, they were made the subject of much reproval and interrogation.