“Yet what?” asked Mrs. Williams, leaning forward between the two men.

“Th’ great joy comes only once; an’ when it cam’ t’ me, A put a handspike thro’ it, an’ kept it.”

He had come to her that morning with a look on his face that she had not dreamed a human face could wear.  She wondered if all men crucified for right won such joy.  And he did not tread earth.  He trod air.  Eleanor could not trust her eyes to meet his.  She felt their light burning to the centre of her soul.  What was it?  Was it renunciation?  The thought turned her faint.  Her determination to break his resolution seemed the cheap obtrusion of egotism on the great mission of a devoted life.  Then, going up the hog’s back trail along the rim of the Ridge, they were facing the Holy Cross Mountain.  The glint of the morning sun on the far snows shone like diamonds, a tiared jeweled thing poised in mid-heaven like a crown held by invisible hands; the base of the lower mountain outlines melting and losing edge in the purple shadows; the crown only, shining diademed, winged with opal light.

“Look Dick,” she said pointing with her riding crop, “do you remember the night on the Ridge?  Do you remember about the snow flakes massing to the avalanche?  It has—­hasn’t it?  The Nation has wakened up.”

Wayland looked ahead.  He couldn’t answer.  ’Remember the night on the Ridge?’ He had a lump in his throat and an ache at his heart from never letting himself remember it.  By that strange perversity, which we all know in ourselves, he couldn’t talk.  The hundred and one things he had wanted to ask, died on his lips in a dumbness of gladness.  Of course, you, dear reader, on the return of a husband or wife (prospective or present), on the sudden appearance of friend or kith have never been similarly affected.  You didn’t forget the questions you had meant to ask till thousands of miles again separated you.

It was good to leave the Valley road and go into seclusion and shelter on the Forest trail; for a hurricane September wind was blowing, the kind of Western wind that the Eastern woman with a big hat thinks is possessed by ten thousand devils; the kind of wind that the Eastern office man with sensitive eyes curses with tears that are not grief; the kind of wind that makes the Westerner put screw nails in his hat and look out for the fire guard round wheat, stock and timber.

Such a different home-going he had planned from this visitation of dumb devils that obsessed them both!  He used to dream at night in the Desert of the day, perhaps, coming when they should set out together adventuring a life joy in the Forests; his Forests; when he would show her the golden cottonwoods and the pale birches nursing the pineries to strong maturity; and the fire blisters on the firs; and the sugar blisters on the sugar pines; and the rain of green-gray tempered light from the under side of the funereal hemlocks;