“You must go in and see it,” Sylvie said.  “But first,—­this is the way to the cascade.”

Another bar-place let them in again to another narrow, wild, bush-grown path around the edge of the cliff, the lower spur of the great hill; and down over shelving rocks, a long, gradual descent, to the foot of the fall.

The water foamed and rippled to their feet, as they walked along its varying edge-line on the smooth, sloping stone that stretched back against the perpendicular rampart of the cliff.  The fall itself was hidden in the turn around which, above, they had followed the tangled pathway.

At the farthest projection of the platform they were now treading, they came upon it; beneath it, rather, they looked back and up at its showery silver sheet, falling in sweet, continual thunder into the dark, hollow, rock-encircled pool, thence to tumble away headlong, from point to point, lower and lower yet, by a thousand little breaks and plunges, till it came out into a broad meadow stretch miles and miles away.

“What a hurry it is in, to get down where it is wanted,” said Desire.

She had seated herself beside the curling edge of the swift stream, where it seemed to trace and keep by its own will its boundary upon the nearly level rock, and was gazing up where the white radiance poured itself as if direct from out the blue above.

Mr. Kirkbright stood behind her.

“Most things come to us at last so quietly,” he said.  “It is good to feel and see what a rush it starts with,—­out of that heart of heaven.”

Desire had not said that; but it was just what she had been feeling.  Eager to get to us; coming in a hurry.  Was that God’s impulse toward us?

“Making haste to help and satisfy the world,” Mr. Kirkbright said again.

“A river of clear water of life, coming down out of the throne,” said Miss Euphrasia.  “What a sign it is!”

Mr. Kirkbright walked along the margin of the ledge, farther and farther down.  He tried with his stick some stones that lay across the current at a narrow point where beneath the opposite cliff it bent and turned away, losing itself from their sight as they stood here.  Then he sprang across; crept, stooping, along the narrow foothold under the projecting rock, until he could follow with his eye the course of the rapid water, falling continually to its lower level as it sped on and on, all its volume gathered in one deep, rocky, unchangeable bed.

“What a waiting power!” he exclaimed, springing safely back, and coming up toward them.  “What a stream for mills!  And it turns nothing but the farmers’ grists, till it gets to Tillington.”

Desire was a very little disappointed at this utilitarianism.  She had been so glad and satisfied with the reading of its type; the type of its far-back impulse.

“If there had been mills here, we should not have seen that,” she said; forgetting to explain what.