With a last look round the radiant plain of the hill-top, Isabel followed him over the edge, and down the first steep slope. Instantly they were out of the sunlight and the glow, in chill shadow as yet untouched by the influences of day. Down and down they plunged towards the mists beneath, while, far overhead now, the rosy beams of the day shot out across the world, cut off from them as they went by the intervening bulk of the mountain, sombre and stark. So they came at last to the pavement of white limestone below, and stood on its last, lowest ridge. Beneath them, grey, barren, inhospitable, lay suddenly revealed the topmost end of the little valley, hemmed in by its amphitheatre of cliffs. The mists were scattering now in desolate wisps of vapour, and the air was cold and dank in the shadow of the mountain behind. Through the torn veils of the white fog they could see clearly down upon every detail of the glen--the shape of each poor profitless field of brownish grass, enclosed by intersecting lines of stone wall, with here and there an ash-tree or a hawthorn, weird, tormented, witch-like, crouching eternally beneath the lash of the wind, and shivering in its sparse, blighted garment of leaves. Just below them rose the struggling stream, out of a stone slope thick with nettles that dropped away steeply from the foot of the cliff; it wandered homelessly through two or three grim meadows, where wiry herbage battled with the white outcrop of stone, then passed through a grated barrier into the domain of Ivescar. From the height of the cliff Ivescar itself, house and plantation, seemed more impudently vulgar than ever. The plantation filled the valley, glaringly artificial, glaringly unsuccessful, a serried army of wretched dwarfish little pines. And in the middle shone, steely and cold, the square expanse of the lake, and by its side, isolated on the desert of lawn, the house itself, dome, tower, pinnacles and all, raw, yellow, brutal in its contented ugliness. Kingston and Isabel gazed down at it with distaste; then they turned from the mournful glen, filled with chill shadow and sterile discomfort, to look back at the mountain from which they had descended. Very high overhead towered the imperious western face of the Simonstone, and the whole mass was glowing now like a thing alive, flushed with pulsing blood and vitality. From crown to base it was kindled to an ardent and luminous crimson, at once sombre and gorgeous, at once brilliant and terrible. Kingston and Isabel looked up at it in silence for a moment, then plunged, without a word, down into the bleakness of the stony valley. Another moment, and the mountain had vanished from their sight. They were in the cold shade of the cliffs, and the upper glories were hidden. So, still silent, they made their way through the fields, through the elaborate iron gates of the park, and into the pretentious deserts of Ivescar.