“Yes!” And with the word she put her lips to his with all her heart in them.  She felt him tremble.  Yet almost instantly he put her from him.

“Look for me to-morrow about this time,” he whispered.  “Keep your nerve. ...  Good night.”

That night Joan dreamed strange, weird, unremembered dreams.  The next day passed like a slow, unreal age.  She ate little of what was brought to her.  For the first time she denied Kells admittance and she only vaguely sensed his solicitations.  She had no ear for the murmur of voices in Kells’s room.  Even the loud and angry notes of a quarrel between Kells and his men did not distract her.

At sunset she leaned out of the little window, and only then, with the gold fading on the peaks and the shadow gathering under the bluff, did she awaken to reality.  A broken mass of white cloud caught the glory of the sinking sun.  She had never seen a golden radiance like that.  It faded and dulled.  But a warm glow remained.  At twilight and then at dusk this glow lingered.

Then night fell.  Joan was exceedingly sensitive to the sensations of light and shadow, of sound and silence, of dread and hope, of sadness and joy.

That pale, ruddy glow lingered over the bold heave of the range in the west.  It was like a fire that would not go out, that would live to-morrow, and burn golden.  The sky shone with deep, rich blue color fired with a thousand stars, radiant, speaking, hopeful.  And there was a white track across the heavens.  The mountains flung down their shadows, impenetrable, like the gloomy minds of men; and everywhere under the bluffs and slopes, in the hollows and ravines, lay an enveloping blackness, hiding its depth and secret and mystery.

Joan listened.  Was there sound or silence?  A faint and indescribably low roar, so low that it might have been real or false, came on the soft night breeze.  It was the roar of the camp down there—­the strife, the agony, the wild life in ceaseless action—­the strange voice of gold, roaring greed and battle and death over the souls of men.  But above that, presently, rose the murmur of the creek, a hushed and dreamy flow of water over stones.  It was hurrying to get by this horde of wild men, for it must bear the taint of gold and blood.  Would it purge itself and clarify in the valleys below, on its way to the sea?  There was in its murmur an imperishable and deathless note of nature, of time; and this was only a fleeting day of men and gold.

Only by straining her ears could Joan hear these sounds, and when she ceased that, then she seemed to be weighed upon and claimed by silence.  It was not a silence like that of Lost Canon, but a silence of solitude where her soul stood alone.  She was there on earth, yet no one could hear her mortal cry.  The thunder of avalanches or the boom of the sea might have lessened her sense of utter loneliness.

And that silence fitted the darkness, and both were apostles of dread.  They spoke to her.  She breathed dread on that silent air and it filled her breast.  There was nothing stable in the night shadows.  The ravine seemed to send forth stealthy, noiseless shapes, specter and human, man and phantom, each on the other’s trail.