Long, and with reverent silence only broken by an occasional exclamation of wonder, the company gazed upon that strange spectacle, more sadly suggestive than any other of the wonders of the American continent. The voice of merriment, which had been ringing so loudly but a few moments before, was hushed, and tears lay nearer to the surface than laughter. It could not be otherwise than that the spectacle, impressive always, should blend itself with the sorrow of a thousand hearts and the peril of a land, and that something of almost superstitious omen should seem to lie in the recognition. There were no words to syllable the great thoughts of that hour. How could there be? What tongue could have spoken what the heart so sadly reverberated to an inner sense that was subtler and better than hearing? "H. T.," whose tongue, as Margaret Hayley and her companions heard it, had so solemnly apostrophized the iron face of the Old Man of the Mountain in the moonlight of the night before, stood silent and with folded arms on the end of the piazza, his strange, dark face full of a feeling that seemed sad enough for death and yet determined enough for a life of almost terrible daring. He was alone. He seemed to have made, even distantly, but one acquaintance since alighting at the Profile; and that one acquaintance, Halstead Rowan, had not yet paid all the penalty of his mischief in a walk to the Flume. He had no motive to speak: perhaps under no circumstances could he have done so before that company and with the knowledge that the eyes of Margaret Hayley might be bent upon him from the other end of that group of gazers. But the man who had read the patriotic secret of the Mountain Sphynx felt the weight of that hour--who could doubt it? And if his lips had spoken, would not the words they uttered have been something like these, that have bubbled to other lips and yet been denied utterance, on the same spot and since the overcasting of our national sky by that dark cloud of war and that darker cloud of divided feeling, only to be rolled away in God's good time: