"
The third was a cluster of long slender crystals set in a fragment of
rock the color of a blush rose.[4]
"'Tis a magic stone, sweetheart. Keep it in the sunshine on thy
window-ledge, and when summer is over 't will be white as snow. Leave it
in a snowbank, or in a cellar under wet moss, and 't will turn again to
rose-color. This I have seen. In the winter nights the Frost King hangs
his ice-diamonds on every twig and rope and eave, and when they shine in
the red sunrise they look like these crystals. And I have seen all the
sky from the zenith to the horizon at midnight full of leaping rose-red
flames above such a world of ice. 'Tis very beautiful there, Reine
Margot, and fit kingdom for a fairy queen."
Marguerite turned the strange quartz rock about in her small hands with
something like awe.
"And the shoes are shoes of silence, for an Indian can go and come in
them so softly that even a rabbit does not hear. They were made by a
kind old squaw who would take no pay, and a young warrior gave me the
wampum belt, and I found the stone one day while I was hunting in the
forest, so that all three of thy gifts are really gifts from Norumbega."
"I think--I'm rather glad it is not a real city," said Margot with a
long breath. "It is more like fairyland, just as it is,--and the Frost
King and the terrible sickness are the two ogres, and the good medicine
man is a white wizard.
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