While they were eating, Grace and Glory described to them the places up on the mountains where the strawberries grew and the banks covered with blueberries, the pine woods with the lovely, spicy smell of sun-warmed cones, the humming of the bees over the fields of flowers, and even a little bit about the King’s gardens and the pomegranate trees in whose shade they had eaten their breakfast that very morning. She told them of the King’s love for the pomegranates and the belief of the eastern peoples on the other side of the mountains that no evil spirit can approach a pomegranate tree because it is the Tree of Love.

Then little by little Gloomy and Spiteful began to speak too, hesitatingly at first, asking questions. Gloomy wanted to know what the white, goldenhearted flowers were in the center of the table which gave forth the lovely perfume. She had never seen such flowers before. Grace and Glory blushed a little as she answered that they were the flowers of love which grow up on the High Places, but she did not add that she had picked those particular blooms from the tree which the Shepherd had planted in her own heart.

Then they wanted to know about her journey, but Grace and Glory did not seem able to say much about that, only to speak of the Shepherd’s goodness and help and over and over again speak of the Shepherd himself.

By the time the delicious little picnic meal was ended the three cousins were talking together with an ease and friendliness which they had never felt before. Stranger still, as Joy and Peace gathered up the remains of the repast, and insisted on doing the washing up away in the background, something happened to Gloomy and Spiteful. They began haltingly and in low voices, often breaking off as though unable to continue, to speak about their own sorrows. Somehow even the names of Coward Fearing, Moody, and Craven Fear passed their lips, poor Spiteful even murmuring excuses for her husband (it was noticeable that never once did she utter a word of blame) and Gloomy, with a dark, painful flush on her cheeks, muttered something about her own cold, haughty attitude and her unfitness for marriage, unable as she was to win and keep her husband’s love.

Then Grace and Glory, also hesitatingly, told them of her own experience, of the plant in her heart which she had supposed to be love, only to find that it was selfish, possessive love and the longing to be loved, and of all the anguish it had caused her until, away up there on the mountains, it had been wrenched out of her heart altogether. She told them also of her two companions, Sorrow and Suffering, and how up on the High Places, they had actually been transformed into Joy and Peace. And the two handmaidens, hearing their names mentioned, looked round and smiled radiantly.

As she spoke it seemed that, in some miraculous way, the stuffy, miserable attic had expanded and changed, and they were sitting out on the mountainside and the fir trees roofing them overhead, the fresh mountain air blowing around them, and the snowy peaks shining above, and the voice of the great waterfall sounding in their ears as it leaped down singing to the valleys below. Then Grace and Glory sang to them another of the songs which she had learned on the Mountain of Pomegranates.