This seemed very
probable to Mary; yet the thought that he might be avoiding her did not
stab the girl's heart with any sharp pang of shame or pain. A radiant
peace had taken possession of her spirit, stealing into it unaware, as
the perfume of lilies may take possession of the senses, before the
lilies are seen. Though she felt gratitude and something almost like
love for the cure, she was glad that he had sent her into his garden
alone. The flowery knot pinned on the bare breast of mountain seemed
even more to her than the "fairyland" Rose Winter had described.
"Angel-land," she thought, as she saw how secret and hidden the bright
spot was on its high jutting point of rock, with its guardian wall of
towering, ivied ruin on one side, and the tall pale church on another.
She felt that here was a place in which she might find herself again,
the self that had got lost in the dark, somewhere far, far below this
height.
She stood by the low wall which kept the garden from the precipice; and
when she had looked eastward to Italy, and westward where the prostrate
giant of the Tete de Chien mourns over Monaco, she turned toward the
arbour in which the cure had told her to wait. Most of the big gold and
copper grape-leaves had fallen now, but some were left, crisped by
frost until they seemed to have been cut from thin sheets of metal; and
over the mass of knotted branches rained a torrent of freshly opened
roses. They and their foliage made a thick screen, and Mary could not
see the inside of the arbour; but as she reached the entrance Vanno
stood just within, waiting for her, very pale, but with a light on his
face other than the sunlight which streamed over him.
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