As she spoke she stepped on a large flat stone that lay at the water’s edge; and I saw that a succession of such stones, placed at intervals of about a yard, made a path by which the river could be crossed. The current was pretty strong, and as the water was rushing fast between the stones (which barely showed their heads above the stream), I hastened to offer Margaret my hand. But the girl only glanced at me with a look of surprise, and with the nearest approach to a smile which I had seen in her face, she shook her head and began to walk over the stepping-stones with as much composure as if she had been moving across a floor. Now and then she had to make a slight spring to gain the next stone, and she did so with the ease and grace of a fawn. I followed a little way behind, and when we had gained the opposite side we walked in single file along the riverbank, till we came to the spot where the Logan came tumbling and dancing down the side of a rather steep hill to meet the larger stream. The hill was covered with brushwood and bracken, and a few scattered trees; but a path seemed to have been made through the bushes, and up this path we began to scramble. Once or twice I ventured to offer Margaret my hand, but she declined my help, saying that she could get on better alone. After a few minutes of this climbing, Margaret suddenly moved to one side, and sprang down to a tiny morsel of gravelly beach, at the side of the burn. I followed her, and was fairly entranced by what I saw. A little way above us the gorge widened, allowing us to see the trees, which, growing on either side of the brook, interlaced their branches above it. From beneath the trees the stream made a clear downward leap, of perhaps thirty or forty feet, into a pool--the pool at our feet--which was so deep that it seemed nearly as black as ink. The music of the waterfall filled the air so that we could hardly catch the sound of each other’s words; and if we moved to the farther end of the little margin of beach, we heard, instead of the noise of the waterfall, the sweet babbling of the burn over its stony bed. ‘Do you often come here?’ I asked, as we stood at the edge of the stream, some little distance from the fall. ‘Yes, pretty often when I wish to be alone, or to have an hour’s quiet reading.’ ‘As you do to-day,’ said I; ‘that’s as much as to say that you want to have an hour’s quiet reading now.’ ‘So I do,’ said the girl calmly. ‘Or, in other words, that it is time for me to take myself off.’ ‘I did not mean that,’ said Margaret, with perfect placidity. ‘Would you like to go up to the top of the linn?’ ‘Very much,’ said I, and we scrambled up the bank to the upper level of the stream, and gazed down upon the black rushing water and the dark pool beneath, with its fringe of cream-coloured foam. ‘So this is the “Lover’s Leap,”’ I remarked.