“There!” she said, holding back one of the dingy heavy curtains with her small childish hand.

And there, indeed, I saw an astonishment.  It did not lie in the lovely sweeps of hill and hollow stretching away to the horizon, richly wooded, and—­though I saw none of them—­sprinkled, certainly with sweet villages full of human thoughts, loves, and hopes; the astonishment did not lie in this—­though all this was really much more beautiful to the higher imagination—­but in the fact that, at the first glance, I had a vision properly belonging to a rugged or mountainous country.  For I had approached the house by a gentle slope, which certainly was long and winding, but had occasioned no feeling in my mind that I had reached any considerable height.  And I had come up that one beautiful staircase; no more; and yet now, when I looked from this window, I found myself on the edge of a precipice—­not a very deep one, certainly, yet with all the effect of many a deeper.  For below the house on this side lay a great hollow, with steep sides, up which, as far as they could reach, the trees were climbing.  The sides were not all so steep as the one on which the house stood, but they were all rocky and steep, with here and there slopes of green grass.  And down in the bottom, in the centre of the hollow, lay a pool of water.  I knew it only by its slaty shimmer through the fading green of the tree-tops between me and it.

“There!” again exclaimed Miss Gladwyn; “isn’t that beautiful?  But you haven’t seen the most beautiful thing yet.  Grannie, where’s—­ah! there she is!  There’s auntie!  Don’t you see her down there, by the side of the pond?  That pond is a hundred feet deep.  If auntie were to fall in she would be drowned before you could jump down to get her out.  Can you swim?”

Before I had time to answer, she was off again.

“Don’t you see auntie down there?”

“No, I don’t see her.  I have been trying very hard, but I can’t.”

“Well, I daresay you can’t.  Nobody, I think, has got eyes but myself.  Do you see a big stone by the edge of the pond, with another stone on the top of it, like a big potato with a little one grown out of it?”

“No.”

“Well, auntie is under the trees on the opposite side from that stone.  Do you see her yet?”

“No.”

“Then you must come down with me, and I will introduce you to her.  She’s much the prettiest thing here.  Much prettier than grannie.”

Here she looked over her shoulder at grannie, who, instead of being angry, as, from what I had seen on our former interview, I feared she would be, only said, without even looking up from the little blue-boarded book she was again reading—­

“You are a saucy child.”

Whereupon Miss Gladwyn laughed merrily.

“Come along,” she said, and, seizing me by the hand, led me out of the room, down a back-staircase, across a piece of grass, and then down a stair in the face of the rock, towards the pond below.  The stair went in zigzags, and, although rough, was protected by an iron balustrade, without which, indeed, it would have been very dangerous.