“We rode; it seemed my spirit flew,
     Saw other regions, cities new,
     As the world rushed by on either side. 
     I thought, All labor, yet no less
     Bear up beneath their unsuccess. 
     Look at the end of work, contrast
     The petty Done, the Undone vast,
     This present of theirs with the hopeful past! 
     I hoped he would love me.  Here we ride.”

They were to the north of the village, heading for a canon.  The road was good, the day not too warm, and the passionate mountain springtime was bursting into flower and leaf.  Presently walls of rock began to rise about them.  They were of innumerable, indefinable rock colors—­grayish-yellows, dull olives, old rose, elusive purples, and browns as rich as prairie soil.  Coiling like a cobra, the Little Williston raced singing through the midst of the chasm, sun-mottled and bright as the trout that hid in its cold shallows.  Was all the world singing?  Were the invisible stars of heaven rhyming with one another?  Had a lost rhythm been recaptured, and did she hear the pulsations of a deep Earth-harmony—­or was it, after all, only the insistent beat of the poet’s line?

     “What if we still ride on, we two,
     With life forever old, yet new,
     Changed not in kind but in degree,
     The instant made eternity,—­
     And Heaven just prove that I and he
     Ride, ride together, forever ride?”

What Wander said, when he spoke, was, “Walk,” and the remark was made to his horse.  Lady Bel slackened, too.  They were in the midst of great beauty—­complex, almost chaotic, beauty, such as the Rocky Mountains often display.

Wander drew his horse nearer to Kate’s, and as a turning of the road shut them in a solitary paradise where alders and willows fringed the way with fresh-born green, he laid his hand on her saddle.

“Kate,” he said, “can you make up your mind to stay here with me?”

Kate drew in her breath sharply.  Then she laughed.

“Am I to understand that you are introducing or continuing a topic?” she asked.

He laughed, too.  They were as willing to play with the subject as children are to play with flowers.

“I am continuing it,” he affirmed.

“Really?”

“And you know it.”

“Do I?”

“From the first moment that I laid eyes on you, all the time that I was writing to Honora and really was trying to snare your interest, and after she came here,—­even when I absurdly commanded you not to write to me,—­and now, every moment since you set foot in my wild country, what have I done but say:  ‘Kate, will you stay with me?’”

“And will I?” mused Kate.  “What do you offer?”

She once had asked the same question of McCrea.

“A faulty man’s unchanging love.”

“What makes you think it will not change—­especially since you are a faulty man?”