The view from the summit was glorious. From there could be seen the whole of long Lake Löven, the green vales encircling the lake and all the blue hills that shelter the valley. When folks from the shut-in Ashdales climbed to the towering peak they must have thought of the mountain whither the Tempter had once taken Our Lord, that he might show Him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glories.
When Jan had at last left the dense woods behind him and had come to a cleared place, he saw the singer. At the top of the highest peak was a cairn, and on the topmost stone of this cairn silhouetted against the pale evening sky stood Glory Goldie Sunnycastle, in her scarlet dress.
If the folk in the dales and woodlands below had turned their eyes toward the peak just then, they would have seen her standing there in her shining raiment.
Glorv Goldie looked out over miles and miles of country. She saw steep hills crowned with white churches on the shores of the lake, manors and founderies surrounded by parks and gardens, rows of farmhouses along the skirt of the woods, stretches of field and meadow land, winding roads and endless tracts of forest.
At first she sang. But presently she hushed her singing and thought only of gazing out over the wide, open world before her. Suddenly she flung out her arms as if wanting to take it all into her embrace—all this wealth and power and bigness from which she had been shut out until that day.
Jan did not return until far into the night, and when he reached home he could give no coherent account of his movements. He declared he had seen and talked with the senator, but what the senator had advised him to do he could not remember.
"It's no good trying to do anything," he said again and again.
That was all the satisfaction Katrina got.
Jan walked all bent over, and looked ill. Earth and moss clung to his coat, and Katrina asked him if he had fallen and hurt himself.
"No," he told her, but he may have lain on the ground a while.
Then he must be ill, thought Katrina.