t as velvet against the blue
sky or blunt and broken with a thundery look of extinct craters. To the
north Sheila saw a further serenity of mountains, lying low and soft on
the horizon, of another and more wistful blue. Over it all was a sort of
magical haze, soft and brilliant as though the air were a melted
sapphire. There was still blessedness such as Sheila had never felt. She
was filled with a longing to ride on and on until her spirit should pass
into the wide, tranquil, glowing spirit of the lonely land. It seemed to
her that some forgotten medicine man sat cross-legged in a hollow of the
hills, blowing, from a great peace pipe, the blue smoke of peace down and
along the hollows and the canons and the level lengths of range. In the
mighty breast of the blower there was not even a memory of trouble, only
a noble savage serenity too deep for prayer.

She rode for a long while--no sound but her pony's hoofs--her eyes lifted
across the valley until a sudden fragrance drew her attention earthwards.
She was going through an open glade of aspens and the ground was white
with columbine, enormous flowers snowy and crisp as though freshly
starched by fairy laundresses. With a cry of delight Sheila jumped off
her horse, tied him by his reins to a tree, and began gathering flowers
with all the eager concentration of a six-year-old. And, like all the
flower-gatherers of fable from Proserpina down, she found herself the
victim of disaster. When she came back to the road with a useless,
already perishing mass of white, the pony had disappeared. Her knot had
been unfaithful. Quietly that mild-nosed, pensive-eyed, round-bodied
animal had pulled himself free and tiptoed back to join his friends.

Sheila hurried up the road toward the summit she had so recently crossed,
till the altitude forced her to stop with no breath in her body and a
pounding redness before her eyes. She stamped her feet with vexation.
She longed to cry. She remembered confusedly, but with a certain
satisfaction, some of the things Thatcher had said to his team. An entire
and sudden lenience toward the gentle art of swearing was born in her.
She threw her columbine angrily away. She had come so far on her journey
that she could never be able to get back to Thatcher nor even to Duff's
shanty before dark. And how far down still the valley lay with that
shadow widening and lengthening across it!

Her sudden loneliness descended upon her with an almost audible ru