It was an old game of theirs, encouraged by their hearty father, to be
out in the early hour on a rise of ground near the house and 'call the
morning.' Her brother was glad of the challenge, and upon one of the
yawns following a sleepless night, replied with a return to boyishness:
'Yes, if you like. It's the last time we shall do her the service here.
Let's go.'

They sprang up together and the bench fell behind them. Swinging the
lantern he carried inconsiderately, the ring of it was left on his
finger, and the end of candle rolled out of the crazy frame to the floor
and was extinguished. Chillon had no match-box. He said to her:

'What do you think of the window?--we've done it before, Carin. Better
than groping down stairs and passages blocked with lumber.'

'I'm ready,' she said, and caught at her skirts by instinct to prove her
readiness on the spot.

A drop of a dozen feet or so from the French window to a flower--bed was
not very difficult. Her father had taught her how to jump, besides the
how of many other practical things. She leaped as lightly as her brother,
never touching earth with her hands; and rising from the proper
contraction of the legs in taking the descent, she quoted her father:
'Mean it when you're doing it.'

'For no enemy's shot is equal to a weak heart in the act,'

Chillon pursued the quotation, laying his hand on her shoulder for a sign
of approval. She looked up at him.

They passed down the garden and a sloping meadow to a brook swollen by
heavy rains; over the brook on a narrow plank, and up a steep and stony
pathway, almost a watercourse, between rocks, to another meadow, level
with the house, that led ascending through a firwood; and there the
change to thicker darkness told them light was abroad, though whether of
the clouded moon or of the first grey of the quiet revolution was
uncertain. Metallic light of a subterranean realm, it might have been
thought.

'You remember everything of father,' Carinthia said. 'We both do,' said
Chillon.

She pressed her brother's arm. 'We will. We will never forget anything.'

Beyond the firwood light was visibly the dawn's. Half-way down the
ravines it resembled the light cast off a torrent water. It lay on the
grass like a sheet of unreflecting steel, and was a face without a smile
above. Their childhood ran along the tracks to the forest by the light,
which was neither dim nor cold, but grave; presenting tree and shrub and
dwarf grow