n doing?"

"Shine on pale moon, don't mind me," laughed Wayland; but suddenly he
stopped storming.

The slant sunlight struck the Holy Cross Mountain turning the snow
gullies pure gold against the luminous peak. Just for a moment the
white cornice of snow forming the bar of the apparent cross flushed to
the Alpine glow, flushed blood-red and quivering like a cross poised in
mid-air. An invisible hand of silence touched them both. The sunset
became a topaz gate curtained by clouds of fire and lilac mist; while
overhead across the indigo blue of the high rare mountain zenith slowly
spread and faded a light--ashes of roses on the sun altar of the dead
day.

CHAPTER II

AN INTERLUDE THAT CAME UNANNOUNCED

Wayland stopped storming. His cynical laugh came back an echo hard to
his own hearing. Was It speaking the same mute language to her It had
spoken to him since first he came to the Holy Cross? The violet
shadows of twilight slowly filled with a primrose mist, with a rapt
hush as of the day's vespers. The great quiet of the mountain world
wrapped them round as in an invisible robe of worship.

Always, as the red flush ran the spectrum gamut of the yellows and
oranges and greens and blues and purples to the solitary star above the
opaline peak, he had wanted to wait and see--what? He did not know.
It had always seemed, if he watched, the primrose veil would lift and
release some phantom with noiseless tread on a ripple of night wind.
In his lonely vigils he used to listen for all the little bells of the
nodding purple heather to begin ringing some sort of pixie music, or
for the flaming tongues of the painter's flower to take voice in some
chorus that would beat time to the rhythm of woodland life fluting the
age-old melodies of Pan.

You would look and look at the winged flames of light swimming and
shimmering and melting outlines in the opal clouds there, till almost
it became a sort of Mount of Transfiguration, of free uncabined
roofless night-dreams camped beneath the sheen of a million stars.

You would listen and listen to the mountain silence--rare, hushed,
silver silence--till almost you could hear; but until to-night it had
always been like the fall of the snow flake. You could never be quite
sure you heard, though there was no mistaking a mass of several million
years of snow flakes when they thundered down in avalanche or broke a
ledge with the boom of artillery.

Now, at last--was it