So five days passed, the intimacy deepening hourly, while every evening brought its gift of quiet converse on the starlit verandah, and every morning its glad summons to another day of enthusiastic activity. Catherine counted these days as a miser counts his gold. The High School, and all the premature anxieties and responsibilities that poverty had laid upon her seemed so far away. Now, for the first time, she realised what life might mean, what for some few it did mean.
“Only seven days more!” she sighed, as she bound her hair before the looking-glass, just a week after her arrival. “What a glorious week it has been! If only the next is as good!”
Brilliant weather still smiled upon them. They were to go that day for a longer excursion than any they had as yet undertaken, a long climb, which involved the aid of guides, and which was to be shared by some of the other visitors.
Margaret was waiting for Catherine on the verandah.
“How lovely you are!” she exclaimed, in a sudden burst of admiration, as the sun caught the girl’s bright brown hair, and bathed her figure in a kind of golden glory. “Do you know, if you were not you, I might be afraid”—she added in a whisper, looking significantly at Granville who was some yards away, talking to the guide.
Catherine’s face crimsoned. “Oh, how can you say such things?” she asked indignantly.
“Forgive me, dear, it was too bad. But I never knew a girl less conscious of her own power, or less of a coquette than you. I would trust you not only with my brother, but with my lover, if by any possibility one should fall to my share.”
“Margaret! When everyone loves you!” cried her friend.
“Now we are getting sentimental, and we had better join the others,” laughed Margaret. And so at last they started, a merry chattering party, up the steep ascent to the mountains.
Catherine never forgot that day; the first few miles of shady forest, where ferns and bilberries nestled by quiet springs of water, and the shy inhabitants of the pine-trees fled away with a rustling of branches and nimble feet at their approach. And then the gradual cool emergence on wide green fields, in whose hollows lay the quiet blue lakes, troubled only by the gentle hoofs of the dainty bell-adorned cattle. Here they found, by bubbling springs, bright patches of blue gentian, that outrivalled the sky in brilliancy, and bade defiance to the vanishing mantle of half-melted snow that lay around them. All these things Catherine seemed to see in a kind of glorified vision, and though Granville was beside her, neither spoke much; the rest of the party had hastened on with mirth and laughter; Margaret especially had discovered that one of the guides was a most interesting companion, and was chattering gaily to him in German.