They ushered her through the tiled halls, past the chapel, and, amid sacred images set in the whitewashed walls, to her room, the bare cell of a priest, with the name of one of the early Fathers of the Church inscribed above the door and a crucifix over the narrow iron bed.
A flood of memories from her convent days deluged her. Muriel sank upon her knees and prayed.
She had not breakfasted, and she could eat no lunch. A half-hour after her arrival she began her ascent to the Grotto of the Magdalen.
She walked across the plain, first through the fields and then through a gradually mounting forest to which an axe had never been laid. The hill became steeper and steeper; it grew into a mountain. The leaf-strewn path turned, under ancient trees with interlacing branches, about giant boulders covered with moss through the centuries that had gone by since they were first flung there from the towering frost-loosened crags above. She passed an old spring and a ruined shrine, and so she reached at last the foot of a precipice as bare as her hand, a huge wall of smooth rock that leaned far forward from the clouds as if it were about to fall.
Under a crumbling gateway she passed and ascended the worn, canting steps, which, by a series of sharply angular divergences, led a third of the way up the face of the precipice. There, fronting a narrow, deserted natural balcony, was the grotto.
Doors had been placed at the mouth of the great cave, but the doors were open. Through them, far in the cool shadows, Muriel caught a glimpse of the white altar and a sound of dripping water that fell from the cavern's ceiling of living rock into the Holy Pool. She took an irresolute step toward this strange chapel; then she turned toward the low parapet and looked over the mountain side, over the primæval forest, to the plateau far below and the peaks and ridges beyond. She remembered von Klausen's words:
"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plain that seems a world away; the snow-capped peaks to the northward; the faint tinkle of distant sheep-bells, and the memory——"
She gave a little gasp: her husband was coming up the steps.
He mounted slowly. His back bent painfully to the climb. She could see that he was breathing heavily and, as he raised his face to hers, she noticed with a throb of self-accusation that it looked tired and old.