Filled with morning light it seemed larger, a little important and quite self-sufficient, giving out its secret strangeness of a Swiss room, old; pre-existing English visitors, proof, with its way of being, set long ago and unaltered, against their travelled hilarity. The little parlour piano, precious in chosen wood highly polished, with faded yellow keys and faded silk behind its trellis, was full of old music, seemed to brood over the carollings of an ancient simplicity unknown to the modern piano whose brilliant black and white makes it sound in a room all the time, a ringing accompaniment to the life of to-day. But into this averted solitude there came to her again the sense of time pouring from an inexhaustible source: gentle, marvellous, unutterably _kind_. It came in through the window whose screened light, filling the small room and halting meditatively there, seemed to wait for song. Drawing back the flimsy curtain from the window, she found it a door giving on a covered balcony through whose panes she saw wan sunless snowfields and beyond them slopes, patched with black pinewoods and rising in the distance to a high ridge, a smooth bulging thickness of snow against deep blue sky. The dense pinewoods thinned and as they climbed into small straggling groups with here and there a single file of trees, small and sharp-pointed, marching towards the top of the ridge. Beautiful this sharp etching far-off of keen black pines upon the sunless snow and strange the clear deep blue of the sky. But mournful; remote and self-sufficient. Switzerland averted and a little discouraging. The balcony extended right and left and a glimpse away to the left of mats hanging out into the open and a maid pouncing forth upon them with a beater sent her to the right, where the distance was obscured by a building standing at right angles to the house, a battered barn-like place, unbalconied, but pierced symmetrically by little windows; châlet, warm rich brown, darkened above by its sheltering, steeply jutting roof ... beautiful. Its kindliness extended all about it, lending a warmth even to the far-off desolate slopes. A door at her side revealed the dining-room lengthwise and deserted, and then she was round the angle of the house and free of its secret: its face towards the valley that was now a vast splendour of sunlight. Every day, through these windows that framed the view in strips this light would be visible in all its changings. Standing at the one that glazed the great mountain whose gold had wakened her she discovered that the balcony was a verandah, had in front of it a railed-in space set with chairs and tables. In a moment she was out in the open light, upon a shelf, within the landscape that seemed now to be the whole delight of Switzerland outspread before her eyes.