He was glad to come to what he called the door to the Hidden Place. He opened it for her; that is, he shoved aside a mass of leaves, holding the branches back with his body. Gloria went through the opening thus afforded, climbed a long, slanting whitish granite slab, and cried out ecstatically at the beauty of the spot. Before her was a tiny meadow, as green and smooth as velvet, thick with white and yellow violets. About it, rimming it in clean lines which did not invade the sward, were pines, and beyond the pines, to be seen in broken glimpses among their sturdy straight trunks, were the cliffs shutting all in. Through one of these vistas she saw a white waterfall, its wide-flung drops of spray all the colours of the rainbow as the sun caught them. The water fell into a green pool, spilled over, flowed through a rock channel of its own ancient carving, and curved away through the meadow. On the edge of this granite basin, with showers of spray breaking over it, a little bird bobbed and dipped and, lifting its head with its own inimitably bright gesture, broke into a sweet singing as liquidly musical as the falling water.
"The Water-Ouzel!" cried Gloria. "See, I remembered his name. And he is here to welcome us."
Under the pines, where the ground was dry, King made their camp-fire, a small blaze of dry twigs between two flat stones. Gloria was every bit as exultantly delighted with the moment as she could have been were she really "about ten years old."
"I want to help. What can I do? Tell me, Mark, what can I do? Oh, the coffee; you can't make coffee without water, can you?" She caught up the new tin coffee-pot and ran across the meadow to the creek. The little bird had given over singing and watched her; when she was mindful of his previous rights and did not come too near his waterfall, he gave over any foolish notion he may have had of flight and cocked his eye again at the pool. Perhaps the coffee-pot put him in mind of his own dinner. Gloria, kneeling at her task, watched him. He seemed to reflect a moment; then with a sudden flirt and flutter he had broken the surface of the water and was gone out of sight. She gasped; he had gone right under the waterfall, a little bundle of feathers no bigger than her clenched hand. She knelt with one knee getting wet and never knowing it; she began to feel positive that the hardy, headlong little fellow surely must be battered to death and drowned. Then with the abruptness of a flash of light there he was again, on the surface now, driving himself forward toward the bank. And there he sat again on his rock, the water flung from him to flash and mingle with the falling spray, his head back, his throbbing little throat pouring out his fluent melody. Gloria laughed happily and went back to King and the fire with her pot of water.