'I will,' she said.

The dreary vision of a home with an unloving uncle was not brightened
by the alternative of her brother's having to support her. She spoke of
money. 'Have we none, Chillon?'

'We have no debts,' he answered. 'We have a claim on the Government here
for indemnification for property taken to build a fortress upon one of
the passes into Italy. Father bought the land, thinking there would be
a yield of ore thereabout; and they have seized it, rightly enough, but
they dispute our claim for the valuation we put on it. A small sum they
would consent to pay. It would be a very small sum, and I 'm father's
son, I will have justice.'

'Yes!' Carthinia joined with him to show the same stout nature.

'We have nothing else except a bit to toss up for luck.'

'And how can I help being a burden on my brother?' she inquired, in
distress.

'Marry, and be a blessing to a husband,' he said lightly.

They performed a sacrifice of the empty bottle and cracked cup on
the site of their meal, as if it had been a ceremony demanded from
travellers, and leaving them in fragments, proceeded on their journey
refreshed.

Walking was now high enjoyment, notwithstanding the force of the
sun, for they were a hardy couple, requiring no more than sufficient
nourishment to combat the elements with an exulting blood. Besides they
loved mountain air and scenery, and each step to the ridge of the pass
they climbed was an advance in splendour. Peaks of ashen hue and pale
dry red and pale sulphur pushed up, straight, forked, twisted, naked,
striking their minds with an indeterminate ghostliness of Indian, so
strange they were in shape and colouring. These sharp points were the
first to greet them between the blue and green. A depression of the pass
to the left gave sight of the points of black fir forest below, round
the girths of the barren shafts. Mountain blocks appeared pushing up
in front, and a mountain wall and woods on it, and mountains in the
distance, and cliffs riven with falls of water that were silver skeins,
down lower to meadows, villages and spires, and lower finally to
the whole valley of the foaming river, field and river seeming in
imagination rolled out from the hand of the heading mountain.

'But see this in winter, as I did with father, Chillon!' said Carinthia.

She said it upon love's instinct to halo the scene with something beyond
present vision, and to sanctify it for her brother, so that this walk of