the eye with its unspotted mantle of shimmering white, and slaying the
sense of proportion with its immeasurable vastness.

Gertrude caught her breath, and Brockway stood uncovered beside her,
silent and watchful. When her eyes began to fill with tears, he broke
the spell.

"Forgive me," he said, quickly; "it was almost cruel not to prepare you,
but I wanted to see if it would appeal to you as it does to me."

"It is unspeakable," she said, softly. "Shall we stop here?"

"No." He took her arm again and together they climbed higher on the
mountain-side; silently, as befitted time and place, but each with a
heartful of thoughts too large for speech.

XXII

ON THE SPUR-TRACK

At the precise moment when Gertrude and Brockway, pausing in their
breath-cutting scramble up the bowlder-strewn mountain-side, were
casting about for a suitable place in which to eat their luncheon,
President Vennor and his guests were rising from the table after a
rather early midday meal in car Naught-fifty. When the ladies had gone
to their staterooms, the President sent Quatremain upon a wholly
unnecessary errand to the post-office, and drew up a chair to smoke a
cigar with Fleetwell.

It was not for nothing that he banished the secretary. The forenoon
train from Clear Creek Canyon had arrived without bringing Gertrude; and
the wires, which he had waited upon with increasing disquietude, still
remained churlishly silent. A crisis in Gertrude's affair seemed
imminent, and, as a last resort, Mr. Vennor had resolved to admonish
Fleetwell, to the end that the collegian's wooing might be judiciously
accelerated.

"I am afraid you have been lukewarm with Gertrude once too often,
Chester, my boy," he began, with studied bluntness. "You ought by all
means to have gone up in the mountains with her to-day."

Fleetwell tried to look properly aggrieved, and succeeded fairly well.
"That's rather hard on me, isn't it? when I didn't so much as know she
was going?"

"That is precisely the point I wished to arrive at," the President
asserted, blandly. "You should have known. You can scarcely expect her
to thrust her confidence upon you."

In his way, Fleetwell could be quite as plain-spoken as his hard-eyed
cousin, and he answered the President's implication without pretending
to misunderstand it.

"You mean that I've been shirking; that I haven't been properly reading
my lines in the little comedy planned by my grandfather; is that it?