When they reached the top of the mountain, the horses were left in care of the servants, and the people wandered about at their pleasure, dividing into little groups and enjoying themselves as best suited their peculiar idiosyncracies.
Late in the afternoon, Sybil Chase, who had been talking first with one group then with another, looked about and missed Margaret and Hinchley; it seemed proper to her, in her wisdom, that their movements should be watched, and she flitted hither and yon among the trees in search of them.
Margaret had gone with Hinchley and a young girl, who had her own object in seeking that part of the woods, in search of a spring that broke out from the hollow of a charming little dell near by, filling the woods with its crystalline music. The hollow was celebrated not only for its spring of fresh water, but for the bird-songs that rung through it from morning to night, making the place, in more senses than one, a paradise.
The friends walked on, enjoying the shadows and sunshine that played through the branches. Margaret had, really, no thought of avoiding any of her party; but after Laurence left her side, she had little care about time or place.
As they came near the dell, Margaret's young friend changed her mind, as girls of sixteen sometimes will, very unaccountably. She had seen a certain young gentleman flitting through the distant shadows, and as his supposed presence there had brought her toward the spring, a glimpse of his movements in another direction checked her desire for a drink of cold water on the instant. But she was seized with an overpowering hunger for young wintergreen, and that always grew best on slopes which the sunshine visited occasionally--never in hollows.
She mentioned this craving wish with some hesitation, but Margaret only smiled and said:
"Nonsense, nonsense; time enough for that when we have seen the spring."
They moved a few paces and came in sight of the dell, a beautiful hollow shaded with hemlocks, dogwood and wild honeysuckles.
Fragments of rock lay in the bed of the hollow, through which a crystal brooklet, born at the spring, crept and murmured caressingly, sending up its tiny spray, and clothing its friends, the rocks, with the brightest moss. Water-cresses shone up through the waves, and speckled trout slept under the fern-leaves.