She could not tell afterwards--though she often asked herself the question--at what point the landscape struck her as being strangely familiar. Yet she was sure that the recognition came to her suddenly. Sir Oliver since the morning's start had been indisposed to talk. From time to time he drew out his map and consulted it. The M'Lauchlin lads, on the other hand, seemed to be restless. During the halt for the midday meal they drew aside together and Ruth heard them conversing in eager whispers. Possibly this stirred some expectation in her, which passed into surmise, into certainty. Late in the afternoon she drew in the paddle she had been plying, laid it across the canoe, and called softly,-- "Oliver!" He turned. She was pointing to a hill now full in view ahead of them. "That cliff . . . you remember--the eagles?" He laughed as though the question amused him. "It is very like. Yes, certainly, it is very like. But wait until we open the clump of trees 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.