ve and courteous, but ever watchful of his sister's
face.

She gazed straight ahead when she was not looking at anything to which
Dinah called her attention. Her eyes had the intense look of one who
watches perpetually for something just out of sight.

Quiet but alert, he marked her attitude, marked also the emaciation which
was so painfully apparent in the strong sunshine and formed so piteous a
contrast to the vivid youth of the girl beside her. Presently Dinah came
out of her rhapsodies and observed his vigilance. She watched him
covertly for a time while she still chatted on. And she noted that there
were very weary lines about his eyes, lines of anxiety, lines of
sleeplessness, that filled her warm heart with quick sympathy and a
longing to help.

The road was one of wild beauty. It wound up a desolate mountain pass
along which great black boulders were scattered haphazard like the mighty
toys of a giant. The glittering snow lay all around them, making their
nakedness the more apparent. And far, far above, the white crags shone
with a dazzling purity in the sunlit air.

Below them the snow lay untrodden, exquisitely pure, piled here in great
drifts, falling away there in wonderful curves and hollows, but always
showing a surface perfect and undesecrated by any human touch. And ever
the sleigh ran smoothly on over the white road till it seemed to Dinah as
if they moved in a dream. She fell silent, charmed by the swift motion,
and by the splendour around her.

"You are quite warm, I hope?" Scott said, after an interval.

She was wrapped in a fur cloak belonging to Isabel. She smiled an
affirmative, but she saw him as through a veil. The mystery and the
wonder of creation filled her soul.

"I feel," she said, "I feel as if we were being taken up into heaven."

"Oh, that we were!" said Isabel, speaking suddenly with a force that had
in it something terrible. "Do you see those golden peaks, sweetheart?
That is where I would be. That is where the gates of Heaven open--where
the lost are found."

Dinah's hand was clasped in hers under the fur rug, and she felt the thin
fingers close with a convulsive hold.

Scott leaned forward. "Heaven is nearer to us than that, Isabel," he said
gently.

She looked at him for a moment, but her eyes at once passed beyond. "No,
no, Stumpy! You never understand," she said restlessly. "I must reach the
mountain-tops or die. I am tired--I am tired of my prison. And I stifle
in t