however they managed it, and got that out.  You see I’m not quite sure of the order of things, or of the chemical part.  But they got it out, and something took it.  Then they put in quicksilver, and that took hold of the gold.  Then there were silver and copper and iron.  So they had to put back the lead again, and that grappled the silver.  And what they did with the copper and iron is just what I can’t possibly recollect, but they divided them somehow, and there was the great rock riddle all read out.  Now, haven’t we been just like that this summer?  And I wonder if the world isn’t like it, somehow?  And ourselves, too, all muddled up, and not knowing what we are made of, till the right chemicals touch us?  There’s so much in it, Mr. Wharne, I can’t put it in clear order.  But it is there,—­isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is there,” answered Mr. Wharne, with the briefest gravity.  For Miss Craydocke, there were little shining drops standing in her eyes, and she tried not to wink lest they should fall out, pretending they had been really tears.  And what was there to cry about, you know?

“Here we have been,” Sin Saxon resumed, “all crushed up together, and the characters coming out little by little, with different things.  Sulphur’s always the first,—­heats up and flies off,—­it don’t take long to find that; and common oxygen gets at common lead, and so on; but, dear Miss Craydocke, do you know what comforts me?  That you must have the quicksilver to discover the gold!”

Miss Craydocke winked.  She had to do it then, and the two little round drops fell.  They went down, unseen, into the short pasture-grass, and I wonder what little wild-flowers grew of their watering some day afterward.

It was getting a little too quiet between them now for people on a picnic, perhaps; and so in a minute Sin Saxon said again:  “It’s good to know there is a way to sort everything out.  Perhaps the tares and wheat mean the same thing.  Mr. Wharne, why is it that things seem more sure and true as soon as we find out we can make an allegory to them?”

“Because we do not make the allegory.  It is there, as you have said.  ’I will open my mouth in parables.  I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.’  These things are that speech of God that was in the beginning.  The Word made flesh,—­it is He that interpreteth.”

That was too great to give small answer to.  Nobody spoke again till Sin Saxon had to jump up to attend to her coffee, that was boiling over, and then they took up their little cares of the feast, and their chat over it.

Cakes and coffee, fruits and cream,—­I do not care to linger over these.  I would rather take you to the cool, shadowy, solemn Minster cavern, the deep, wondrous recess in the face of solid rock, whose foundation and whose roof are a mountain; or above, upon the beetling crag that makes but its porch-lintel, and looks forth itself across great air-spaces toward its kindred cliffs, lesser and more mighty, all around, making one listen in one’s heart for the awful voices wherewith they call to each other forevermore.