ake, you
could have felt what I have been feeling since we left Sabines; the
_goodness_ all about us, watching us out of the night and the stars."

She looked up; but the stars were gone, faded out into daylight. He
pushed his horse half a pace ahead, and glanced sideways at her face.
Tears shone yet in her eyes, and his own, as he quickly averted them,
fell on a tall mullein growing by the roadside. Big drops of dew
adhered upon its woolly leaves and twinkled in the sunshine; and by
contrast he knew the colour of her eyes--that they were violet and of
the night--their dew distilled out of such violet darkness as had been
the quality of one or two Mediterranean nights that lingered among his
memories of the Grand Tour. More and more this girl surprised him with
graces foreign to this colonial soil, graces supposed by him to be
classical and lost, the appanage of goddesses.

Like a goddess now she lifted an arm and pointed west, as he had pointed
east. Ahead of them, to the right of the road, rose a tall hill, wooded
at the base, broken at the summit by craggy terraces. Two large birds
wheeled and hovered above it, high in the blue, fronting the sunlight.

"Eagles, by Jove!" cried Sir Oliver.

Ruth drew a breath and watched them. She had never before seen an
eagle.

"Will they have their nest in the cliffs?" she asked.

"Perhaps. . . . No, more likely they come from Wachusett; more likely
still, from the mountains beyond. They are here seeking food."

"They do not appear to be seeking food," she said after a pause during
which she watched their ambits of flight circling and intersecting
"See the nearest one mounting, and the other lifting on a wider curve to
meet him above. One would say they followed some pattern, like folks
dancing."

"Some act of homage to the sun," he suggested. "They have come down to
the sea to meet him--they look over the Atlantic from aloft there--and
perform in his honour. Who knows?"

Across Ruth's inner vision there flashed a memory of Mr. Hichens,
black-suited and bald, bending over his Hebrew Bible and expounding a
passage of Job: "_Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her
nest on high? She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the crag of
the rock, and the strong place_. . . ."

To herself she said: "If it be so, the eagle's faith is mine; my lord's
also, perchance, if he but knew it."

Aloud she asked, "Why are the noblest, birds and beasts, so few and