“Come close,” said he, and now there was no doubt the smile was real.  “Shall we keep step, do you think?”

“If we go always like this, we might,” said Sylvia, with a smile.

“At times there will be a step to be cut, no doubt,” said he.

“You once said that I could stand firm while the step was being cut,” she answered.  Always at the back of both their minds, evident from time to time in some such phrase as this, was the thought of the mountain upon which their friendship had been sealed.  Friendship had become love here in the quiet Dorsetshire village, but in both their thoughts it had another background—­ice-slope and rock-spire and the bright sun over all.

CHAPTER XX

ON THE DOWN

Sylvia led the way to a little hollow just beneath the ridge of the downs, a sheltered spot open to the sea.  On the three other sides bushes grew about it and dry branches and leaves deeply carpeted the floor.  Here they rested and were silent.  Upon Sylvia’s troubled heart there had fallen a mantle of deep peace.  The strife, the fears, the torturing questions had become dim like the small griefs of childhood.  Even the incident of the lighted window vexed her not at all.

“Hilary,” she said softly, lingering on the name, since to frame it and utter it and hear her lips speaking it greatly pleased her, “Hilary,” and her hand sought his, and finding it she was content.

It was a warm night of August.  Overhead the moon sailed in a cloudless summer sky, drowning the stars.  To the right, far below, the lamps of Weymouth curved about the shore; and in front the great bay shimmered like a jewel.  Seven miles across it the massive bluff of Portland pushed into the sea; and even those rugged cliffs were subdued to the beauty of the night.  Beneath them the riding-lights shone steady upon the masts of the battle ships.  Sylvia looked out upon the scene with an overflowing heart.  Often she had gazed on it before, and she marveled now how quickly she had turned aside.  Her eyes were now susceptible to beauty as they had never been.  There was a glory upon land and sea, a throbbing tenderness in the warm air of which she had not known till now.  It seemed to her that she had lived until this night in a prison.  Once the doors had been set ajar for a little while—­just for a night and a day in the quiet of the High Alps.  But only now had they been opened wide.  Only to-night had she passed through and looked forth with an unhindered vision upon the world; and she discovered it to be a place of wonders and sweet magic.

“They were true, then,” she said, with a smile on her lips.

“Of what do you speak?” asked Chayne.

“My dreams,” Sylvia answered, knowing that she was justified of them.  “For I have come awake into the land of my dreams, and I know it at last to be a real land, even to the sound of running water.”