As she spoke, she raised her eyes to the sky, and uttered an involuntary exclamation. "Look, look!" she cried--"How glorious!" The heavens above them were glowing red,--forming a dome of burning rose, deepening in hue towards the sea, where the outer rim of the nearly vanished sun was slowly disappearing below the horizon--and in the centre of this ardent glory, a white cloud, shaped like a dove with outspread wings, hung almost motionless. The effect was marvellously beautiful, and Angus, full of his own joy, was more than ever conscious of the deep content of a spirit attuned to the infinite joy of nature. "It is like the Holy Grail," he said, and, with one arm round the woman he loved, he softly quoted the lines:-- "And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail, Rose-red, with beatings in it as if alive!" "That is Tennyson," she said. "Yes--that is Tennyson--the last great poet England can boast," he answered. "The poet who hated hate and loved love." "All poets are like that," she murmured. "Not all, Mary! Some of the modern ones hate love and love hate!" "Then they are not poets," she said. "They would not see any beauty in that lovely sky--and they would not understand----" "Us!" finished Angus. "And I assure you, Mary at the present moment, we are worth understanding!" She laughed softly. "Do we understand ourselves?" she asked. "Of course we don't! If we did, we should probably be miserable. It's just because we are mysterious one to another, that we are so happy. No human being should ever try to analyse the fact of existence. It's enough that we exist--and that we love each other. Isn't it, Mary?" "Enough? It is too much,--too much happiness altogether for _me_, at any rate," she said. "I can't believe in it yet! I can't really, Angus! Why should you love me?" "Why, indeed!" And his eyes grew dark and warm with tenderness--"Why should you love _me_?" "Ah, there's so much to love in you!" and she made her heart's confession with a perfectly naive candour. "I daresay you don't see it yourself, but I do!" "And I assure you, Mary," he declared, with a whimsical solemnity, "that there's ever so much more to love in you! I know you don't see it for yourself, but I do!" Then they laughed together like two children, and all constraint was at an end between them. Hand in hand they descended the grassy steep of the "Giant's Castle"--charmed with one another, and at every step of the way seeing some new delight which they seemed to have missed before. The crimson sunset burned about them like the widening petals of a rose in fullest bloom,--earth caught the fervent glory and reflected it back again in many varying tints of brilliant colour, shading from green to gold, from pink to amethyst--and as they walked through the splendid vaporous light, it was as though they were a living part of the glory of the hour.