"Some day. Some day, if the owner will sell, you shall have it framed,
with our travels marked out upon it. But, just now, it holds a small
secret."

She questioned him no further. "Come," she said, "reach your arm in at
the window and draw the bolt, and afterwards we will pull the shutter
and nail it. Are you going inside for a last look around?"

He laughed. "Why? The knapsacks are here, ready."

"Our home!"

"I take the soul of it with me, taking you."

It was prettily said. Yet perversely she remembered how he had once
spoken of Margaret Dance, saying, "Let the dead bury their dead."

The sky, after six angry days--two sullen, four tempestuous--was clear
again and promised another stretch of fair weather. This was
important, for they counted on having to sleep a night in the open
before reaching the M'Lauchlins' camp. Old Strongtharm had told Sir
Oliver of a cave at the head of the pass and directed him how to find
it. Should the sky's promise prove false, they would descend back to
the hut. Snow was their one serious peril.

They carried but the barest necessaries; for although the worst of the
falls lay below and behind them, the upper part of the Gap was arduous
enough, and the more difficult for being unknown; also Sir Oliver had
old Strongtharm's assurance that the M'Lauchlins would furnish them with
all things requisite for voyaging by water.

Sir Oliver climbed in silence. He was flinging a bridge, albeit a short
one, across the unknown, and the risk of it weighed on him. For himself
this would have counted nothing, but he was learning the lesson common
to all male animals whose mates for the first time travel beside them.
As for Ruth, it was wonderful--the course of the path once turned, the
small home left out of sight--how securely she breasted the upward path.
Her lover and she were as gods walking, treading the roof of the world.

Through thickets they climbed, and by stairways beside the singing
falls. In a pool below one of these falls they surprised a great loon
that had resorted here to live solitary through his moulting-season.
He rose and winged away with a cry like an inhuman laugh; and they
recognised a sound which had often been borne down the gorge--once or
twice at night, to awake and puzzle them.

They came to the uppermost fall a good hour before sunset, and after a
little search Sir Oliver found the cave. They could have pushed on, but
decided to sleep here: a