“Even so,” was the answer.  “Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook, but at any rate we shall have got Comanche.”

They turned the horses in the other direction, and took the climb of the Nun Canyon road that led over the divide and down into the Napa Valley.  But the climb was hard, the going was slow.  Sometimes they topped the bed of the torrent by hundreds of feet, and again they dipped down and crossed and recrossed it twenty times in twice as many rods.  They rode through the deep shade of clean-bunked maples and towering redwoods, to emerge on open stretches of mountain shoulder where the earth lay dry and cracked under the sun.

On one such shoulder they emerged, where the road stretched level before them, for a quarter of a mile.  On one side rose the huge bulk of the mountain.  On the other side the steep wall of the canyon fell away in impossible slopes and sheer drops to the torrent at the bottom.  It was an abyss of green beauty and shady depths, pierced by vagrant shafts of the sun and mottled here and there by the sun’s broader blazes.  The sound of rushing water ascended on the windless air, and there was a hum of mountain bees.

The horses broke into an easy lope.  Chris rode on the outside, looking down into the great depths and pleasuring with his eyes in what he saw.  Dissociating itself from the murmur of the bees, a murmur arose of falling water.  It grew louder with every stride of the horses.

“Look!” he cried.

Lute leaned well out from her horse to see.  Beneath them the water slid foaming down a smooth-faced rock to the lip, whence it leaped clear—­a pulsating ribbon of white, a-breath with movement, ever falling and ever remaining, changing its substance but never its form, an aerial waterway as immaterial as gauze and as permanent as the hills, that spanned space and the free air from the lip of the rock to the tops of the trees far below, into whose green screen it disappeared to fall into a secret pool.

They had flashed past.  The descending water became a distant murmur that merged again into the murmur of the bees and ceased.  Swayed by a common impulse, they looked at each other.

“Oh, Chris, it is good to be alive . . . and to have you here by my side!”

He answered her by the warm light in his eyes.

All things tended to key them to an exquisite pitch—­the movement of their bodies, at one with the moving bodies of the animals beneath them; the gently stimulated blood caressing the flesh through and through with the soft vigors of health; the warm air fanning their faces, flowing over the skin with balmy and tonic touch, permeating them and bathing them, subtly, with faint, sensuous delight; and the beauty of the world, more subtly still, flowing upon them and bathing them in the delight that is of the spirit and is personal and holy, that is inexpressible yet communicable by the flash of an eye and the dissolving of the veils of the soul.