He looked to see how she would take it. There was not the first twinkle of a simper about eye or lip. Surprised, but quite gravely, she looked up, and met his odd bluntness with as quaint an honesty of her own. "I was pretty sure of it a while ago," she said. "And perhaps I was, in a demoralized sort of a way. But I've come down, Mr. Wharne,--like the c.o.o.n. I'll tell you presently," she went on,--and she spoke now with warmth,--"who is the real belle,--the beautiful one of this place! There she comes!"

Miss Craydocke, in her nice, plain cambric morning-gown, and her smooth front, was approaching down the side pa.s.sage across the wing. Just as she had come one morning, weeks ago; and it was the identical "fresh petticoat" of that morning she wore now. The sudden coincidence and recollection struck Sin Saxon as she spoke. To her surprise, Miss Craydocke and Marmaduke Wharne moved quickly toward each other, and grasped hands like old friends.

"Then you know all about it!" Sin Saxon said, a few minutes after, when she got her chance. "But you _don't_ know, sir," she added, with a desperate candor, "the way I took to find it out! I've been tormenting her, Mr. Wharne, all summer. And I'm heartily ashamed of it."

Marmaduke Wharne smiled. There was something about this girl that suited his own vein. "I doubt she _was_ tormented," he said quietly.

At that Sin Saxon smiled, too, and looked up out of her hearty shame which she had truly felt upon her at her own reminder. "No, Mr. Wharne, she never was; but that wasn't my fault. After all, perhaps,--isn't that what the optimists think?--it was best so. I should never have found her thoroughly out in any other way. It's like"--and there she stopped short of her comparison.

"Like what?" asked Mr. Wharne, waiting.

"I can't tell you now, sir," she answered with a gleam of her old fearless brightness. "It's one end of a grand idea, I believe, that I just touched on. I must think it out, if I can, and see if it all holds together."

"And then I'm to have it?"

"It will take a monstrous deal of thinking, Mr. Wharne."

CHAPTER XV.

QUICKSILVER AND GOLD.

"If I could only remember the chemicals!" said Sin Saxon. She was down among the outcrops and fragments at the foot of Minster Rock. Close in around the stones grew the short, mossy sward. In a safe hollow between two of them, against a back formed by another that rose higher with a smooth perpendicular, she had chosen her fireplace, and there she had been making the coffee. Quite intent upon the comfort of her friends she was to-day; something really to do she had: "in better business," as Leslie Goldthwaite phrased it to herself once, she found herself, than only to make herself brilliant and enchanting after the manner of the day at Feather-Cap. And let me a.s.sure you, if you have not tried it, that to make the coffee and arrange the feast at a picnic like this is something quite different from being merely an ornamental. There is the fire to coax with chips and twigs, and a good deal of smoke to swallow, and one's dress to disregard. And all the rest are off in scattered groups, not caring in the least to watch the pot boil, but supposing, none the less, that it will. To be sure, Frank Scherman and Dakie Thayne brought her firewood, and the water from the spring, and waited loyally while she seemed to need them; indeed, Frank Scherman, much as he unquestionably was charmed with her gay moods, stayed longest by her in her quiet ones; but she herself sent them off, at last, to climb with Leslie and the Josselyns again into the Minster, and see thence the wonderful picture that the late sloping light made on the far hills and fields that showed to their sight between framing tree-branches and tall trunk-shafts as they looked from out the dimness of the rock.

She sat there alone, working out a thought; and at last she spoke as I have said: "If I could only remember the chemicals!"

"My dear! What do you mean? The chemicals? For the coffee?" It was Miss Craydocke who questioned, coming up with Mr. Wharne.

"Not the coffee,--no," said Sin Saxon, laughing rather absently, as too intent to be purely amused. "But the--a.s.saying. There,--I've remembered _that_ word, at least!"

Miss Craydocke was more than ever bewildered. "What is it, my dear? An experiment?"

"No; an a.n.a.logy. Something that's been in my head these three days. I can't make everything quite clear, Mr. Wharne, but I know it's there. I went, I must tell you, a little while ago, to see some Colorado specimens--ores and things--that some friends of ours had, who are interested in the mines; and they talked about the processes, and somebody explained. There were gold and silver and iron, and copper and lead and sulphur, that had all been boiled up together some time, and cooled into rock. And the thing was to sort them out. First, they crushed the whole ma.s.s into powder, and then did something to it--applied heat, I believe--to drive away the sulphur. That fumed off, and left the rest as promiscuous as before. Then they--oxidized the lead, however they managed it, and got that out. You see I'm not quite sure of the order of things, or of the chemical part. But they got it out, and something took it. Then they put in quicksilver, and that took hold of the gold. Then there were silver and copper and iron. So they had to put back the lead again, and that grappled the silver. And what they did with the copper and iron is just what I can't possibly recollect, but they divided them somehow, and there was the great rock riddle all read out. Now, haven't we been just like that this summer?

And I wonder if the world isn't like it, somehow? And ourselves, too, all muddled up, and not knowing what we _are_ made of, till the right chemicals touch us? There's so much in it, Mr. Wharne, I can't put it in clear order. But it _is_ there,--isn't it?"

"Yes, it is there," answered Mr. Wharne, with the briefest gravity. For Miss Craydocke, there were little shining drops standing in her eyes, and she tried not to wink lest they should fall out, pretending they had been really tears. And what was there to cry about, you know?

"Here we have been," Sin Saxon resumed, "all crushed up together, and the characters coming out little by little, with different things.

Sulphur's always the first,--heats up and flies off,--it don't take long to find that; and common oxygen gets at common lead, and so on; but, dear Miss Craydocke, do you know what comforts me? That you _must_ have the quicksilver to discover the gold!"

Miss Craydocke winked. She had to do it then, and the two little round drops fell. They went down, unseen, into the short pasture-gra.s.s, and I wonder what little wild-flowers grew of their watering some day afterward.

It was getting a little too quiet between them now for people on a picnic, perhaps; and so in a minute Sin Saxon said again: "It's good to know there is a way to sort everything out. Perhaps the tares and wheat mean the same thing. Mr. Wharne, why is it that things seem more sure and true as soon as we find out we can make an allegory to them?"

"Because we do _not_ make the allegory. It is there, as you have said.

'I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.' These things are that speech of G.o.d that was in the beginning. The Word made flesh,--it is He that interpreteth."

That was too great to give small answer to. n.o.body spoke again till Sin Saxon had to jump up to attend to her coffee, that was boiling over, and then they took up their little cares of the feast, and their chat over it.

Cakes and coffee, fruits and cream,--I do not care to linger over these.

I would rather take you to the cool, shadowy, solemn Minster cavern, the deep, wondrous recess in the face of solid rock, whose foundation and whose roof are a mountain; or above, upon the beetling crag that makes but its porch-lintel, and looks forth itself across great air-s.p.a.ces toward its kindred cliffs, lesser and more mighty, all around, making one listen in one's heart for the awful voices wherewith they call to each other forevermore.

The party had scattered again, after the repast, and Leslie and the Josselyns had gone back into the Minster entrance, where they never tired of standing, and out of whose gloom they looked now upon all the flood of splendor, rosy, purple, and gold, which the royal sun flung back--his last and richest largess--upon the heights that looked longest after him. Mr. Wharne and Miss Craydocke climbed the cliff. Sin Saxon, on her way up, stopped short among the broken crags below. There was something very earnest in her gaze, as she lifted her eyes, wide and beautiful with the wonder in them, to the face of granite upreared before her, and then turned slowly to look across and up the valley, where other and yet grander mountain ramparts thrust their great forbiddance on the reaching vision. She sat down, where she was, upon a rock.

"You are very tired?" Frank Scherman said, inquiringly.

"See how they measure themselves against each other," Sin Saxon said, for answer. "Look at them, Leslie and the rest, inside the Minster that arches up so many times their height above their heads,--yet what a little bit, a mere mousehole, it is out of the cliff itself; and then look at the whole cliff against the Ledges, that, seen from anywhere else, seem to run so low along the river; and compare the Ledges with Feather-Cap, and Feather-Cap with Giant's Cairn, and Giant's Cairn with Washington, thirty miles away!"

"It is grand surveying," said Frank Scherman.

"I think we see things from the little best," rejoined Sin Saxon.

"Washington is the big end of the telescope."

"Now you have made me look at it," said Frank Scherman, "I don't think I have been in any other spot that has given me such a real idea of the mountains as this. One must have steps to climb by, even in imagination.

How impertinent we are, rushing at the tremendousness of Washington in the way we do; scaling it in little pleasure-wagons, and never taking in the thought of it at all!"

Something suddenly brought a flush to Sin Saxon's face, and almost a quiver to her lips. She was sitting with her hands clasped across her knees, and her head a little bent with a downward look, after that long, wondering mountain gaze, that had filled itself and then withdrawn for thought. She lifted her face suddenly to her companion. The impetuous look was in her eyes. "There's other measuring too, Frank. What a fool I've been!"

Frank Scherman was silent. It was a little awkward for him, scarcely comprehending what she meant. He could by no means agree with Sin Saxon when she called herself a fool; yet he hardly knew what he was to contradict.

"We're well placed at this minute. Leslie Goldthwaite and Dakie Thayne and the Josselyns half way up above there, in the Minster. Mr. Wharne and Miss Craydocke at the top. And I down here, where I belong.

Impertinence! To think of the things I've said in my silliness to that woman, whose greatness I can no more measure! Why didn't somebody stop me? I don't answer for you, Frank, and I won't keep you; but I think I'll just stay where I am, and not spoil the significance!"

"I'm content to rank beside you; we can climb together," said Frank Scherman. "Even Miss Craydocke has not got to the highest, you see," he went on, a little hurriedly.

Sin Saxon broke in as hurriedly as he, with a deeper flush still upon her face. "There's everything beyond. That's part of it. But she helps one to feel what the higher--the Highest--must be. She's like the rock she stands on. She's one of the steps."

"Come, Asenath, let's go up." And he held out his hand to her till she took it and rose. They had known each other from childhood, as I said; but Frank Scherman hardly ever called her by her name. "Miss Saxon" was formal, and her school sobriquet he could not use. It seemed to mean a great deal when he did say "Asenath."

And Sin Saxon took his hand and let him lead her up, notwithstanding the "significance."

They are young, and I am not writing a love-story; but I think they will "climb together;" and that the words that wait to be said are mere words,--they have known and understood each other so long.

"I feel like a camel at a fountain, drinking in what is to last through the dry places," said Martha Josselyn, as they came up. "Miss Saxon, you don't know what you have given us to-day. I shall take home the hills in my heart."

"We might have gone without seeing this," said Susan.

"No, you mightn't," said Sin Saxon. "It's my good luck to see you see it, that's all. It couldn't be in the order of things, you know, that you should be so near it, and want it, and not have it, somehow."

"So much _is_ in the order of things, though!" said Martha. "And there are so many things we want, without knowing them even to _be_!"

"That's the beauty of it, I think," said Leslie Goldthwaite, turning back from where she stood, bright in the sunset glory, on the open rock.

Her voice was like that of some young prophet of joy, she was so full of the gladness and loveliness of the time. "That's the beauty of it, I think. There is such a worldful, and you never know what you may be coming to next!"