yonder. . . ."

They opened it, and her heart gave a leap. A moment before she had been
sure this was the very hill. His laugh had confirmed it. . . .
She remembered how, at the foot of it, just such a river as this looped
itself through the plain. . . . But, lo! in the opening gap, inch by
inch, a long building displayed itself: a mansion, gleaming white, with
a pillared front and pillared terraces, rising--terrace on terrace--from
the woodland, into which a cascade of water, spouting half-way down the
slope, plunged and was lost.

She sat dumb. His eyes were upon her; and he laughed quietly.

"It is yours--as you commanded. See!"

He flung out a hand to the left. She beheld a clearing--an avenue, that
ran like a broad ribbon to the summit of a flat-topped rise.

"You demanded sight of the ocean," he was saying, and his voice seemed
to lose itself in the beat of the churning paddles. "We cannot see it
from here; but from the house--_your_ house--you shall look on it every
day. Did you not bid me remove a mountain?"

For the rest of the way she sat as in a dream. One of the M'Lauchlin
lads had produced a cow-horn and was blowing it lustily. . . .
They came to shore by river-stairs of stone, where two servants in the
Vyell livery stood like statues awaiting them.

It was falling dusk when Sir Oliver disembarked and gave her his hand.
The men-servants, who had bent to hold the canoe steady as she stepped
ashore, drew themselves erect and again touched foreheads to their lord
and lady.

Still as in a dream, her arm resting within her lover's, she went up the
broad stairways from terrace to terrace. Above her the long facade was
lit with window after window blazing welcome.

At the head of the perron, under the colonnaded portico, other tall
men-servants stood in waiting, mute, deferential. She passed between
their lines into a vast entrance hall, and there, almost as her foot
crossed its threshold, across the marbled floor little Miss Quiney came
running a-flutter, inarticulate, with reaching hands.

Ruth drew back, almost with a cry. But before she could resist, Tatty's
arms were about her and Tatty's lips lifted, pressed against either
cheek. She suffered the embrace.

"My darling Ruth!--at last!" Then with a laugh, "And in what strange
clothes! . . . But come--come and be arrayed!" She caught Ruth's cold
hand and led her towards the staircase. "Nay, never look about you so:
your eyes will n