Meantime the subject of these criticisms was carrying away her own
reflections tightly buttoned up in her short jacket. She had driven back
her dog Spot--another one of her disillusions, who, giving way to
his lower nature, had once killed a sheep--as she did not wish her
Jacques-like contemplation of any wounded deer to be inconsistently
interrupted by a fresh outrage from her companion. The air was really
very chilly, and for the first time in her mountain experience the
direct rays of the sun seemed to be shorn of their power. This compelled
her to walk more briskly than she was conscious of, for in less than an
hour she came suddenly and breathlessly upon the mouth of the canyon, or
natural gateway to Eagle's Court.

To her always a profound spectacle of mountain magnificence, it seemed
to-day almost terrible in its cold, strong grandeur. The narrowing pass
was choked for a moment between two gigantic buttresses of granite,
approaching each other so closely at their towering summits that trees
growing in opposite clefts of the rock intermingled their branches and
pointed the soaring Gothic arch of a stupendous gateway. She raised her
eyes with a quickly beating heart. She knew that the interlacing trees
above her were as large as those she had just quitted; she knew also
that the point where they met was only half-way up the cliff, for she
had once gazed down upon them, dwindled to shrubs from the airy summit;
she knew that their shaken cones fell a thousand feet perpendicularly,
or bounded like shot from the scarred walls they bombarded. She
remembered that one of these pines, dislodged from its high foundations,
had once dropped like a portcullis in the archway, blocking the pass,
and was only carried afterwards by assault of steel and fire. Bending
her head mechanically, she ran swiftly through the shadowy passage, and
halted only at the beginning of the ascent on the other side.