"Here is the path once more!" cried Sir Archibald, who was twenty steps ahead of them.
"Oh, yes! There is the path! Thank you, Mr. Westhove!" said Eva, and she sprang from the last stepping-stone, pushing her way through the snapping bracken to the beaten track.
"And up there is the hut with the weather-cock," her father went on. "I believe we have made a long round out of our way. Instead of chattering so much, you would do well to keep a sharp lookout for the path. My old eyes, you know—"
"But it was great fun jumping over the stones," laughed Eva.
Far above them they could now see the hut with the tall pole of the weather-cocK, and they went on at an easier pace, their feet sinking in the violet and pink blossomed heath, crushing the bilberries, dimly purple like tiny grapes. Eva stooped and picked some.
"Oh! so nice and sweet!" she exclaimed, with childish surprise, and she pulled some more, dyeing her lips and fingers blue with the juice of the berries. "Taste them, Mr. Westhove."
He took them from her soft, small hand, stained as it were with purple blood. It was true; they were deliciously sweet, and such fine ones!
And then they went on again, following Sir Archibald, often stopping, and triumphing like children when they came on a large patch where the whortleberries had spread unhindered like a miniature orchard.
"Papa, papal Do try them!" Eva cried, heedless of the fact that papa was far ahead; but Sir Archibald was not out of sight, and they had to run to overtake him; Eva's laughter ringing like a bell, while she lamented that she must leave so many berries untouched—and such beauties!
"I dare say there will be plenty round the hut," said Frank, consolingly.
"Do you think so?" she said, with a merry laugh. "Oh, what a couple of babies we are!"
The path grew wider, and they found it easy walking up to the top, sometimes quitting the track and scrambling over the stones to shorten the way. Presently they heard a shout, and, looking up, they saw Sir Archibald standing on the cairn in which the staff of the weather-cock was fixed, and waving his traveling-cap. They hurried on, and soon were at his side. Eva knocked at the door of the hut.
“The hut is shut up," said her father.
"How stupid!" she exclaimed. "Why does it stand here at all if it is shut up? Does no one live in it?"
"Why, of course not," said Sir Archibald, as if, it was the most natural thing in the world.
Frank helped Eva to climb the cairn round the pole, and they looked down on the panorama at their feet.
"It is beautiful, but melancholy," said Eva.
The long fjord lay below them, a narrow ribbon of pale, motionless water, hemmed in by the mountains, now wreathed with gray vapor, through which they gleamed fitfully like ghosts of mountains; Lauparen and Vengetinder, TroUtinder and Romsdalhorn, towering up through the envious, rolling mist, which, swelled by the coming storm, hung in black clouds from every peak and cast a gloomy reflection on the still waters. The hills were weeping—unsubstantial, motionless phantoms, sorrowing and tragical under some august and superhuman woe—a grief as of giants and demigods; the fjord, with its township, a plot of gardens, and roofs, and walls, and the white chalet of the Grand Hotel—all weeping, all motionless under the gloomy sky. A ghostly chill rose up from the gulf to where the trio stood, mingling with the tangible clamminess of the mist, which seemed to weigh on their eyelids. It was not raining, but the moisture seemed to distil on them from the black unbroken rack of clouds; and to the westward, between two cliffs which parted to show a gleaming strip of ocean, a streak was visible of pale gold and faint rose-color—hardly more than a touch of pink, a sparkle of gold—a stinted alms of the setting sun. They scarcely said another word, oppressed by the superhuman sadness which enwrapped them like a shroud. When Eva at last spoke her clear voice sounded far away—through a curtain.
"Look, there is a glint of sunshine over the sea. Here we are pining for the sun. Oh, I wish the sun would break through the clouds! It is so dismal here—so dreary! How well I understand Oswald's cry in Ibsen's 'Ghosts' when he is going mad: 'The sun, the sun!' Men might pray for sunshine here and get no more than that distant gleam. Oh, I am perished!"
She shivered violently under the stiff, shining folds of her waterproof cloak; her face was drawn and white, and her eyes looked large and anxious.
She suddenly felt herself so forlorn and lonely that she instinctively took her father's arm and clung to him closely.
"Are you cold, my child; shall we go home?" he asked.
She nodded, and they both helped her down the heap of stones. Why, she knew not, but suddenly she had thought of
