“What were you talking about when we came up?  Your face looked as if you were listening to music.”

“About Wordsworth,” said Mercy.  “Parson Dorrance said such a beautiful thing about him.  It was like music, like far off music,” and she repeated it to Stephen.  “I wonder if I shall ever reach that cathedral,” she added.

“Well, I’ve never reached it,” said Stephen, “and I’m a good deal older than you.  I think two thirds of Wordsworth’s poetry is imbecile, absolutely imbecile.”

Mercy was too much under the spell of Parson Dorrance’s recent words to sympathize in this; but she had already learned to avoid dissent from Stephen’s opinions, and she made no reply.  They were sitting on the edge of a great fissure in the mountain.  Some terrible convulsion must have shaken the huge mass to its centre, to have made such a rift.  At the bottom ran a stream, looking from this height like little more than a silver thread.  Shrubs and low flowering things were waving all the way down the sides of the abyss, as if nature had done her best to fill up the ugly wound.  Many feet below them, on a projecting rock, waved one little white blossom, so fragile it seemed as if each swaying motion in the breeze must sever it from the stem.

“Oh, see the dainty, brave little thing!” exclaimed Mercy.  “It looks as if it were almost alone in space.”

“I will get it for you,” said Stephen; and, before Mercy could speak to restrain him, he was far down the precipice.  With a low ejaculation of terror, Mercy closed her eyes.  She would not look on Stephen in such peril.  She did not move nor open her eyes, until he stood by her side, exclaiming, “Why, Mercy! my darling, do not look so!  There was no danger,” and he laid the little plant in her hand.  She looked at it in silence for a moment, and then said,—­

“Oh, Stephen! to risk your life for such a thing as that!  The sight of it will always make me shudder.”

“Then I will throw it away,” said Stephen, endeavoring to take it from her hand; but she held it only the tighter, and whispered,—­

“No! oh, what a moment! what a moment!  I shall keep this flower as long as I live!” And she did,—­kept it wrapped in a paper, on which were written the following lines:—­

  A moment.

  Lightly as an insect floating
    In the sunny summer air,
  Waved one tiny snow-white blossom,
  From a hidden crevice growing,
    Dainty, fragile-leaved, and fair,
  Where great rocks piled up like mountains,
  Well-nigh to the shining heavens,
    Rose precipitous and bare,
  With a pent-up river rushing,
    Foaming as at boiling heat
    Wildly, madly, at their feet.

  Hardly with a ripple stirring
    The sweet silence by its tone,
  Fell a woman’s whisper lightly,—­
  “Oh, the dainty, dauntless blossom! 
    What deep secret of its own
  Keeps it joyous and light-hearted,
  O’er this dreadful chasm swinging,
    Unsupported and alone,
  With no help or cheer from kindred? 
    Oh, the dainty, dauntless thing,
    Bravest creature of the spring!”