s impassioned.

"_I_ know what it is," he cried. Then, as she read his look, her
cheeks crimsoned, and it would have been superfluous for him to have
added, "Love." He drew back almost with a start, and began to scrape
the paint smears from his palette. He had quelled the insurrection. At
least in words, he had not broken his vow.

For a moment, the girl stood silent. She felt herself trembling; then,
taking refuge in childlike inconsequence, she peered over the edge of
the cliff.

"Oh!" she exclaimed as though the last few moments had not been lived
through, "there is the most wonderfulest flower!" Her voice was
disappointment-laden. "And it's just out of reach."

Saxon had regained control of himself. He answered with a composure
too calm to be genuine and an almost flippant note that rang false.

"Of course. The most wonderfulest things are always just out of reach.
The edelweiss grows only among the glaciers, and the excelsior crop
must be harvested on inaccessible pinnacles."

He came and looked over the edge, stopping close to her shoulder. He
wanted to demonstrate his regained command of himself. A delicate
purple flower hung on the cliff below as though it had been placed
there to lure men over the edge.

He looked down the sheer drop, appraised with his eye the frail
support of a jutting root, then slipped quietly over, resting by his
arms on the ledge of rock and groping for the root with his toe.

With a short, gasping exclamation, the girl bent forward and seized
both his elbows. Her fingers clutched him with a strength belied by
their tapering slenderness.

"What are you doing?" she demanded.

She was kneeling on the ledge, and in her eyes, only a few inches from
his own, he read, not only alarm, but back of that in the depths of
the pupils something else. It might have been the reflection of what
she had a few moments before read in his own. He could feel the soft
play of her breath on his forehead, and his heart pounded so wildly
that it seemed to him he must raise his voice to be heard above it.
Yet, his words and smile were sane.

"I am going to gather flowers," he assured her. "You see," he added
with an irrelevant whimsicality, "I want to see if the unattainable
is really beyond me."

"If you go," she said with ominous quietness of voice, "I shall come,
too."

The man clambered back to the ledge. "I'm not going," he announced.

For a time, neither spoke. Each, with a consciousness of