"Oh! so nice and sweet!" she exclaimed, with childish surprise, and she pulled some more, dyeing her lips and fingers blue with the juice of the berries. "Taste them, Mr. Westhove."
He took them from her soft, small hand, stained as it were with purple blood. It was true; they were deliciously sweet, and such fine ones!
And then they went on again, following Sir Archibald, often stopping, and triumphing like children when they came on a large patch where the whortleberries had spread unhindered like a miniature orchard.
"Papa, papa! Do try them!" Eva cried, heedless of the fact that papa was far ahead; but Sir Archibald was not out of sight, and they had to run to overtake him; Eva's laughter ringing like a bell, while she lamented that she must leave so many berries untouched--and such beauties!
"I daresay there will be plenty round the hut," said Frank, consolingly.
"Do you think so?" she said, with a merry laugh. "Oh, what a couple of babies we are!"
The path grew wider, and they found it easy walking up to the top, sometimes quitting the track and scrambling over the stones to shorten the way. Presently they heard a shout, and looking up, they saw Sir Archibald standing on the cairn in which the staff of the weathercock was fixed, and waving his travelling-cap. They hurried on, and soon were at his side. Eva knocked at the door of the hut.
"How stupid!" she exclaimed. "Why does it stand here at all if it is shut up? Does no one live in it?"
"Why, of course not," said Sir Archibald, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Frank helped Eva to climb the cairn round the pole, and they looked down on the panorama at their feet.
"It is beautiful, but melancholy," said Eva.
The long fjord lay below them, a narrow riband of pale, motionless water, hemmed in by the mountains, now wreathed with grey vapour, through which they gleamed fitfully like ghosts of mountains; Lauparen and Vengelinder, Trolltinder and Romsdalhorn, towering up through the envious, rolling mist, which, swelled by the coming storm, hung in black clouds from every peak and cast a gloomy reflection on the still waters. The hills were weeping--unsubstantial, motionless phantoms, sorrowing and tragical under some august and superhuman woe--a grief as of giants and demigods; the fjord, with its township, a plot of gardens, and roofs, and walls, and the white châlet of the Grand Hotel--all weeping, all motionless under the gloomy sky. A ghostly chill rose up from the gulf to where the trio stood, mingling with the tangible clamminess of the mist, which seemed to weigh on their eyelids. It was not raining, but the moisture seemed to distil on them from the black unbroken rack of clouds; and to the westwards, between two cliffs which parted to show a gleaming strip of ocean, a streak was visible of pale gold and faint rose-colour--hardly more than a touch of pink, a sparkle of gold--a stinted alms of the setting sun. They scarcely said another word, oppressed by the superhuman sadness which enwrapped them like a shroud. When Eva at last spoke her clear voice sounded far away--through a curtain.