“Give me all you have for me in but one more!” He bent over her face; when he released her, she was faint.

He offered her hand-hold down over the tree trunks to the lake; and when their feet touched solid earth again, took a grip of the situation to relieve her embarrassment and began talking furiously of the Desert ride and the dream face that had twice saved his life.  Eleanor stopped stock still.

“Why, that was my dream,” she explained; and their hands met half way and before she had finished telling, it had happened all over again.

They were standing on the margin of the lake.  The sun was behind the peak, and the wine glow lay on the snow cross, and the topaz gate was ajar again to the new infinite life, and I think they were both a little bit afraid.  An old world poet has said something about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.  The mountaineer expresses the same thought in his own more picturesque and I think more poetic vernacular, certainly it is a vernacular next to life rather than books.  It is an axiom that “only the most blatant tenderfoot, the most tumble-footed greenhorn, will monkey on the edge of a precipice.”

The marbled water shadows deepened to fire in the Alpine after glow; and the little waves of the lake came lipping and lisping and laving at their feet.

“There is no use trying to tell about it or talk it out,” burst out Wayland.

“Don’t,” said Eleanor.  “Mr. Matthews told us much last night:  and I’ll dig the rest out of him the next time I see him.”

“I’m not talking of the Desert.  I’m talking of you.  It’s so God-blessed beautiful, Eleanor!  I used to think and think in the Desert what this would be like; and it’s so much more beautiful than one could hope or guess.  Don’t you think there must be something in God and Heaven and all that?  Love is so much more beautiful than a fellow could possibly think?”

“Don’t you think they’ll be wondering about us?” asked Eleanor.

“Pooh, no!  Matthews told me to come on here and find you!  He’s just back there a little way.”

“Did he plan this?”

“Course!  How do you suppose I knew where to find you?  You see now why I must not see you, if we are to keep our resolutions?”

“Yes, I see!  Let us go back.”

It was on the lake side of the logs that Wayland paused.

“I don’t think they could see through those logs?” he said.

Eleanor burst into a peal of laughter and ascended the fallen trunks as if they had been stairs.

They came on the other two sitting squat in the middle of the trail; and if the windfall had been opaque, one of the two wore an expression on his face as if he had guessed.  He was tossing a handful of little pebbles up from his palm and catching them on the backs of his knuckles.

“We didn’t make much o’ the woods an’ birds,” he remarked with a twisted smile, “but man alive, we can play jacks!”