And moreover they shall soon rest; for look! yonder
is our house for this even, and till to-morrow's sun is high:
the house for me and thee and none else with us." And therewith
she pointed to a place where the stream ran in a chain of pools
and stickles, and a sheer cliff rose up some fifty paces beyond it,
but betwixt the stream and the cliff was a smooth table of greensward,
with three fair thorn bushes thereon, and it went down at each end
to the level of the river's lip by a green slope, but amidmost,
the little green plain was some ten feet above the stream, and was
broken by a little undercliff, which went down sheer into the water.
And Ralph saw in the face of the high cliff the mouth of a cave,
however deep it might be.
"Come," said the Lady, "tarry not, for I know that hunger
hath hold of thee, and look, how low the sun is growing!"
Then she caught him by the hand, and fell to running with him
to the edge of the stream, where at the end of the further
slope it ran wide and shallow before it entered into a deep
pool overhung with boughs of alder and thorn. She stepped
daintily over a row of big stones laid in the rippling shallow;
and staying herself in mid-stream on the biggest of them,
and gathering up her gown, looked up stream with a happy face,
and then looked over her shoulder to Ralph and said:
"The year has been good to me these seasons, so that when I
stayed here on my way to the Castle of Abundance, I found
but few stones washed away, and crossed wellnigh dry-shod,
but this stone my feet are standing on now, I brought
down from under the cliff, and set it amid-most, and I said
that when I brought thee hither I would stay thereon and talk
with thee while I stood above the freshness of the water,
as I am doing now.
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