f the dwelling. The front was
two and a half stories high; the last outlying projection was a
single square apartment with its own low roof; towards the back,
within, you went up flight after flight of short stairs from room to
room, from passage to passage. Once or twice, the few broad steps
between two apartments ran the whole width of the same.

"What a place for plays!"

"Or for a little children's school, ranged in rows, one above
another."

"The man who built it must have dreamt it first!"

These were the exclamations that they made to each other as they
passed through, exploring.

There was a great number of bedrooms, divided off here and there;
the upper front was one row of them with a gallery running across
the house, in whose windows toward the south hung the old red woolen
draperies and the bird-cage.

Below, at the back, the last room opened by a door upon a high, flat
table of the rock, around whose overhanging edge a light railing had
been run. Standing here, they looked up and down the beautiful
gorge, into the heart of the hill and the depth of its secret shaded
places on the one hand, and on the other into the rush and whirl of
the rapidly descending and broken torrent to where it flung itself
off the sudden brink, and changed into white mist and an everlasting
song.

"This last room ought to be a chapel," said Mr. Kirkbright. "Out
here could be open-air service in the beautiful weather, to the
sound of that continual organ."

"You have thought of it, too," exclaimed Desire.

"Of what?" asked Mr. Kirkbright, turning toward her.

"Of what you might make this place."

"What would you make of it?"

They were a little apart, by themselves, again. It kept happening
so. Miss Kirkbright and Sylvie had a great deal to say to each
other.

"I would make it a moral sanatorium. I would take people in here,
and nurse them up by beautiful living, till they were ready to begin
the world again; and then I would have the little new world, of work
and business, waiting just outside. I would have rooms for them
here, that they should feel the _own-ness_ of; flowers to tend;
ferneries in the windows; they could make them from these beautiful
woods, and send them away to the cities; that would be a business at
the very first! I would have all the lovely, natural ways of living
to win them back by,--to teach them pure things; yes,--and I would
have the chapel to teach them the real gospel in! That bird-ca