A few more steps, and Elizabeth gave a cry of pleasure.

They were on the edge of an alpine meadow, encircled by dense forest, and sloping down beneath their feet to a lake that lay half in black shadow, half blazing in the afternoon sun.

Beyond was a tossed wilderness of peaks to west and south.

Light masses of cumulus cloud were rushing over the sky, and driving waves of blue and purple colour across the mountain masses and the forest slopes.

Golden was the sinking light and the sunlit half of the lake; golden the western faces and edges of the mountain world; while beyond the valley, where ran the white smoke of a train, there hung in the northern sky a dream-world of undiscovered snows, range, it seemed, beyond range, remote, ethereal; a Valhalla of the old gods of this vast land, where one might guess them still throned at bay, majestic, inviolate.
But it was the flowers that held Elizabeth mute.