“Don’t!  Don’t!” he cried.  “It is impossible!  Marriage or not, I cannot even say ‘Come.’  I dare not.  I’ll show you.  I’ll tell you.”

He sat up beside her, the action stamped with resolve.  He took her hand in his and held it closely.  His lips moved to the verge of speech.  The mystery trembled for utterance.  The air was palpitant with its presence.  As if it were an irrevocable decree, the girl steeled herself to hear.  But the man paused, gazing straight out before him.  She felt his hand relax in hers, and she pressed it sympathetically, encouragingly.  But she felt the rigidity going out of his tensed body, and she knew that spirit and flesh were relaxing together.  His resolution was ebbing.  He would not speak—­she knew it; and she knew, likewise, with the sureness of faith, that it was because he could not.

She gazed despairingly before her, a numb feeling at her heart, as though hope and happiness had died.  She watched the sun flickering down through the warm-trunked redwoods.  But she watched in a mechanical, absent way.  She looked at the scene as from a long way off, without interest, herself an alien, no longer an intimate part of the earth and trees and flowers she loved so well.

So far removed did she seem, that she was aware of a curiosity, strangely impersonal, in what lay around her.  Through a near vista she looked at a buckeye tree in full blossom as though her eyes encountered it for the first time.  Her eyes paused and dwelt upon a yellow cluster of Diogenes’ lanterns that grew on the edge of an open space.  It was the way of flowers always to give her quick pleasure-thrills, but no thrill was hers now.  She pondered the flower slowly and thoughtfully, as a hasheesh-eater, heavy with the drug, might ponder some whim-flower that obtruded on his vision.  In her ears was the voice of the stream—­a hoarse-throated, sleepy old giant, muttering and mumbling his somnolent fancies.  But her fancy was not in turn aroused, as was its wont; she knew the sound merely for water rushing over the rocks of the deep canyon-bottom, that and nothing more.

Her gaze wandered on beyond the Diogenes’ lanterns into the open space.  Knee-deep in the wild oats of the hillside grazed two horses, chestnut-sorrels the pair of them, perfectly matched, warm and golden in the sunshine, their spring-coats a sheen of high-lights shot through with color-flashes that glowed like fiery jewels.  She recognized, almost with a shock, that one of them was hers, Dolly, the companion of her girlhood and womanhood, on whose neck she had sobbed her sorrows and sung her joys.  A moistness welled into her eyes at the sight, and she came back from the remoteness of her mood, quick with passion and sorrow, to be part of the world again.

The man sank forward from the hips, relaxing entirely, and with a groan dropped his head on her knee.  She leaned over him and pressed her lips softly and lingeringly to his hair.