and a hope. Strangely enough, it was always
duty, this unholy thing which he meant to do--this payment of a debt in
base metal, when the pure gold of love had been promised. But ethics
counted for little to-day as he followed a figure clad in blue serge
down the path that led from the edge of the canyon to the bed of the
stream. Budding willows made a green mist in the depths below them, and
the sweet, tarry odors of the upland blew across the tops of the
sycamores in the canyon and mingled with the smell of damp leaf-mould and
the freshness of growing things.

The girl paused and peered down into the canyon inquiringly.

"Do you think of leaping?" asked Palmerston.

She smiled seriously, still looking down. "No; I was wondering if the
rainfall had been as light in the mountains as it has been in the
valley, and how the water-supply will hold out through the summer if we
have no more."

Palmerston laughed. "Do you always think of practical things?" he asked.

She turned and confronted him with a half-defiant, half-whimsical smile.

"I do not think much about what I think," she said; "I am too busy
thinking."

As she spoke she took a step backward and tripped upon some obstacle in
the path.

Palmerston sprang forward and caught her upraised arm with both hands.

"I--I--love you!" he said eagerly, tightening his grasp, and then
loosening it, and falling back with the startled air of one who hears a
voice when he thinks himself alone.

The young woman let her arm fall at her side, and stood still an
instant, looking at him with untranslatable eyes.

"You love me?" she repeated with slow questioning. "How can you?"

Palmerston smiled rather miserably. "Far more easily than I can explain
why I have told you," he answered.

"If it is true, why should you not tell me?" she asked, still looking at
him steadily.

Evasion seemed a drapery of lies before her gaze. Palmerston spoke the
naked truth:

"Because I cannot ask you to love me in return--because I have promised
to marry another woman, and I must keep my promise."

He made the last avowal with the bitter triumph of one who chooses death
where he might easily have chosen dishonor.

His listener turned away a little, and looked through the green haze of
the canyon at the snow of San Antonio.

"You say that you love me, and yet you intend to marry this other girl,
who loves you, and live a lie?" she asked without looking at him.

"My God! but you make i