scured
itself in a wood, but always going up, up, and with a small cluster of
brown old high-perched chalets evidently for its goal. Mrs. Stringham
reached in due course the chalets, and there received from a bewildered
old woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indication that
sufficiently guided her. The young lady had been seen not long before
passing further on, over a crest and to a place where the way would
drop again, as our unappeased inquirer found it, in fact, a quarter of
an hour later, markedly and almost alarmingly to do. It led somewhere,
yet apparently quite into space, for the great side of the mountain
appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall away altogether, though
probably but to some issue below and out of sight. Her uncertainty
moreover was brief, for she next became aware of the presence on a
fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of the Tauchnitz volume that the
girl had brought out, and that therefore pointed to her shortly
previous passage. She had rid herself of the book, which was an
encumbrance, and meant of course to pick it up on her return; but as
she hadn't yet picked it up what on earth had become of her? Mrs.
Stringham, I hasten to add, was within a few moments to see; but it was
quite an accident that she had not, before they were over, betrayed by
her deeper agitation the fact of her own nearness.

The whole place, with the descent of the path and as a sequel to a
sharp turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall
precipitously and to become a "view" pure and simple, a view of great
extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous. Milly, with the
promise of it from just above, had gone straight down to it, not
stopping till it was all before her; and here, on what struck her
friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path
somehow took care of itself and its final business, but the girl's seat
was a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence that
merely pointed off to the right into gulfs of air and that was so
placed by good fortune, if not by the worst, as to be at last
completely visible. For Mrs. Stringham stifled a cry on taking in what
she believed to be the danger of such a perch for a mere maiden; her
liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single
false movement, by a turn of the head--how could one tell? into
whatever was beneath. A thousand thoughts, for the minute, roared in
the poor lady's