"How high are those hills?"
"Really, I don't know," said her friend laughing. "I will give you a guide book to study."
Rotha thought she would like a guide book. Anything so majestic as the sweep of those mountain lines and the lift of their snowy heads, she had never imagined; nor anything so lovely as the peace of that narrow, meadowy valley at the foot of them.
"Is it as good really, Mrs. Mowbray, as it looks here?" she asked.
"It is better. Don't you think colour goes for anything? and the sound of a cowbell, and the rush of the torrents that come from the mountains?"
"I can hear cowbells and the rush of brooks here," said Rotha.
"It sounds different there."
Slowly and unwillingly and after long looking at it, Rotha laid the Swiss valley away. Her next view happened to be the ruins of the Church at Fountain's Abbey; and with that a new nerve of pleasure seemed to be stirred. This was something in an entirely new department, of knowledge and interest both. "How came people to let such a beautiful church go to ruin?"
Mrs. Mowbray went back to the Reformation, and Henry the Eighth, and the monkish orders; and the historical discussion grew into length. Then a very noble view of the Fountain's Abbey cloisters opened a new field of inquiry; and Rotha's eye gazed along the beautiful arches with an awed apprehension of the life that once was lived under them; gazed and marvelled and queried.
"That was an ugly sort of life," she said at last; "why do I like to look at these cloisters, Mrs. Mowbray?"