The next morning Kate and Alec rose early, to walk before breakfast to the top of one of the hills, through a young larch-wood which covered it from head to foot. The morning was cool, and the sun exultant as a good child. The dew-diamonds were flashing everywhere, none the less lovely that they were fresh-made that morning. The lark's song was a cantata with the sun and the wind and the larch-odours, in short, the whole morning for the words. How the larks did sing that morning! The only clouds were long pale delicate streaks of lovely gradations in gray; here mottled, there swept into curves. It was just the morning to rouse a wild longing for motion, for the sea and its shore, for endless travel through an endless region of grace and favour, the sun rising no higher, the dew lingering on every blade, and the lark never wearying for his nest. Kate longed for some infinitude of change without vicissitude--ceaseless progress towards a goal endlessly removed! She did not know that the door into that life might have been easier to find in that ugly chapel than even here in the vestibule of heaven. "My nurse used to call the lark 'Our Lady's hen,'" said Kate. "How pretty!" answered Alec, and had no more to say. "Are the people of Glamerton very wicked, Alec?" asked Kate, making another attempt to rouse a conversation. "I'm sure I don't know," answered Alec. "I suppose they're no worse than other people." "I thought from Mr Turnbull's sermon that they must be a great deal worse." "Oh! they all preach like that--except good Mr Cowie, and he's dead." "Do you think he knew better than the rest of them?" "I don't know that. But the missionars do know something that other people don't know. And that Mr Turnbull always speaks as if he were in earnest." "Yes, he does." "But there's that fellow Bruce!" "Do you mean the man that put us into his seat?" "Yes. I _can't_ think what makes my mother so civil to him." "Why shouldn't she be?" "Well, you see--I can't bear him. And I can't understand my mother. It's not like her." In a moment more they were in a gentle twilight of green, flashed with streaks of gold. A forest of delicate young larches crowded them in, their rich brown cones hanging like the knops that looped up their dark garments fringed with paler green. And the scent! What a thing to _invent_--the smell of a larch wood! It is the essence of the earth-odour, distilled in the thousand-fold alembics of those feathery trees. And the light winds that awoke blew murmurous music, so sharply and sweetly did that keen foliage divide the air. Having gazed their fill on the morning around them, they returned to breakfast, and after breakfast they went down to the river. They stood on the bank, over one of the deepest pools, in the bottom of which the pebbles glimmered brown. Kate gazed into it abstracted, fascinated, swinging her neckerchief in her hand. Something fell into the water.