The fire did not last them long, for all the twigs they could collect were scanty; the blaze had heated the rock a little; they drew closer to it, and the mother, curling up against it in her shawls, composed herself as she could for slumber; the voices of Orient and Reymund, from where they still sat and talked together, lulled her as the murmur of the waterfall lulled Sleep himself. Orient was repeating Jean Ingelow’s dream of her lover fallen and dead among the hills, with its vague and awesome imagery. “I do not understand,” she said, as she ceased, “this solicitude that my mother and so many others feel concerning their burial-place. I love life, delicious life; but if we die and lie unburied here forever among the lonely precipices, it will not matter any more to us than it did to the youth.” And she repeated again:-- “The first hath no advantage,--it shall not soothe his slumber That a lock of his brown hair his father aye shall keep; For the last, he nothing grudgeth, it shall naught his quiet cumber That in a golden mesh of _his_, callow eaglets sleep.” Reymund quaked at the moment, as he thought of any lustrous lock of Orient’s curling out of the fierce beak that should tear it away from the white brow. Then he said: “Too philosophic by half. As for me, with the first peep of day in this high meridian, I shall be up and doing, and find a way to our level again or--perish in the attempt.” “Resolved to perish, any way. Give you liberty or give you death. _I_ do not feel in such a hurry to be gone. How silent and solemn it is,--what a clear darkness,--listen a moment and catch the sough of that pine forest far beneath, like the wings of some great spirit sifting the air. I have never been so near heaven. I understand now why in the Bible they so often withdrew into a high mountain.” Reymund did not answer her. “Say your prayers, innocent one,” was what he thought. “Wherever you are, there heaven is near.” By and by Orient crept closer to her mother for mutual comfort, wound her own cloak round her like a chrysalis, and drowsed and dreamed.