“Here, here is the spot!” cried the two lovers, with one voice, as they reached a level space on the brink of a small cascade.  “This glen was made on purpose for our temple.”

“And the glad song of the brook will be always in our ears,” said Lilias Fay.

“And its long melody shall sing the bliss of our lifetime,” said Adam Forrester.

“Ye must build no temple here,” murmured their dismal companion.

And there again was the old lunatic standing just on the spot where they meant to rear their lightsome dome, and looking like the embodied symbol of some great woe that in forgotten days had happened there.  And, alas! there had been woe, nor that alone.  A young man more than a hundred years before had lured hither a girl that loved him, and on this spot had murdered her and washed his bloody hands in the stream which sang so merrily, and ever since the victim’s death-shrieks were often heard to echo between the cliffs.

“And see!” cried old Gascoigne; “is the stream yet pure from the stain of the murderer’s hands?”

“Methinks it has a tinge of blood,” faintly answered the Lily; and, being as slight as the gossamer, she trembled and clung to her lover’s arm, whispering, “Let us flee from this dreadful vale.”

“Come, then,” said Adam Forrester as cheerily as he could; “we shall soon find a happier spot.”

They set forth again, young pilgrims on that quest which millions—­which every child of earth—­has tried in turn.

And were the Lily and her lover to be more fortunate than all those millions?  For a long time it seemed not so.  The dismal shape of the old lunatic still glided behind them, and for every spot that looked lovely in their eyes he had some legend of human wrong or suffering so miserably sad that his auditors could never afterward connect the idea of joy with the place where it had happened.  Here a heartbroken woman kneeling to her child had been spurned from his feet; here a desolate old creature had prayed to the evil one, and had received a fiendish malignity of soul in answer to her prayer; here a new-born infant, sweet blossom of life, had been found dead with the impress of its mother’s fingers round its throat; and here, under a shattered oak, two lovers had been stricken by lightning and fell blackened corpses in each other’s arms.  The dreary Gascoigne had a gift to know whatever evil and lamentable thing had stained the bosom of Mother Earth; and when his funereal voice had told the tale, it appeared like a prophecy of future woe as well as a tradition of the past.  And now, by their sad demeanor, you would have fancied that the pilgrim-lovers were seeking, not a temple of earthly joy, but a tomb for themselves and their posterity.

“Where in this world,” exclaimed Adam Forrester, despondingly, “shall we build our temple of happiness?”

“Where in this world, indeed?” repeated Lilias Fay; and, being faint and weary—­the more so by the heaviness of her heart—­the Lily drooped her head and sat down on the summit of a knoll, repeating, “Where in this world shall we build our temple?”