Then David made changes in and about his cabin. He built on another room and put therein a cook stove. He could not bear to see his young wife bending at the hearth preparing their meals, and when she demurred, he explained that he wished to keep her as she was and not see her growing old and wrinkled before her time, with the burning heat of the open fire in her face, like many of the mountain women.
One evening,—they had eaten their supper out under the trees,—she proposed they should walk up to her father's path, as she called the spot toward which she so often lifted her eyes, and David was well pleased to go with her. As they set out, she asked him to wait a moment while she went back for something, and quickly returned, bringing his flute.
"I've often wished father could have heard you play on this," she said, as he took it from her hand.
They crossed the little river that tumbled and rushed among great moss-covered boulders on its way to the fall, and followed its wayward course toward its head, where the way was untrodden and wild, as if no human foot had ever climbed along its banks. After a little they turned off toward a tremendous rock of solid granite that had been cleft smoothly in twain by some gigantic force of nature, and, walking between the towering walls of stone, came out on the farther side upon a small level space, where immense ferns and flags grew thickly in the rich soil, held in place and kept damp by the great cool masses of stone.
Above this little dell the hill rose steeply, and Cassandra led him to a narrow opening in the dense shrubbery surrounding the spot from which a beaten path wound upward, overarched with thickly interlacing branches of birch wood and hemlocks. Along this winding trail they climbed, until they reached a cluster of enormous cedars which made the dark place on the mountain Cassandra had pointed out to him from below. Here the path widened so they could walk side by side, and continued along a level line at the foot of the dark mass of trees.
"Here father used to walk up and down reading in his little books; seems like I can hear his voice now. Sometimes he would look off over the valley below us there and repeat parts by heart. Isn't it beautiful here, David?"
"Heavenly beautiful!"
"I'm glad we never came here before."
"Why, dearest?"
"Because." She hesitated with parted lips, and cheeks flushed from the climb. David stood with bared head. He felt as if he were in a cathedral.