At the gate, Aaron King asked the novelist to go on, saying that he would
soon overtake him. It was possible, he said, that he might have left
something in the spring glade. He thought he had better make sure. Conrad
Lagrange, assenting, went through the gate and down the road, with the
four-footed members of the party; and Czar must have thought that there
was something very funny about old Croesus that morning, from the way his
master laughed; when they were safely around the first turn.
There was, of course, no material thing in the spring glade that the
artist wanted. _He_ knew that--quite as well as his laughing friend. Under
the mistletoe oak, at the top of the bank, he paused, hesitating--as one
will often pause when about to enter a sacred building. Softly, he pushed
open the old gate, as he might have pushed open the door of a church.
Slowly, reverently, he went down the path; baring his head as he went. He
did not search for anything that he might have left. He simply stood for a
few minutes under the gray-trunked alders that were so marked by the
loving hands of long ago men and maidens--beside the mint bordered spring
with the scattered stones of that old foundation--where, through the
screen of boughs and vines and virgin's-bower the sunlight fell as through
the traceries of a cathedral window, and the low, deep tones of the
mountain waters came like the music of a great organ.
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