Valley.

"Come," he said; and they turned and went back through the forest
shade, crossed the stream and came to the lily by the spring.

Here, also, where the way led up the tangle of the steep hill, he had
cut a rough horse trail. As they forced their way up the zigzags, they
caught glimpses out and down through the sea of foliage. Yet always
were their farthest glimpses stopped by the closing vistas of green,
and, yet always, as they climbed, did the forest roof arch overhead,
with only here and there rifts that permitted shattered shafts of
sunlight to penetrate. And all about them were ferns, a score of
varieties, from the tiny gold-backs and maidenhair to huge brakes six
and eight feet tall.

Below them, as they mounted, they glimpsed great gnarled trunks and
branches of ancient trees, and above them were similar great gnarled
branches.

Dede stopped her horse and sighed with the beauty of it all.

"It is as if we are swimmers," she said, "rising out of a deep pool of
green tranquillity. Up above is the sky and the sun, but this is a
pool, and we are fathoms deep."

They started their horses, but a dog-tooth violet, shouldering amongst
the maidenhair, caught her eye and made her rein in again.

They cleared the crest and emerged from the pool as if into another
world, for now they were in the thicket of velvet-trunked young
madronos and looking down the open, sun-washed hillside, across the
nodding grasses, to the drifts of blue and white nemophilae that
carpeted the tiny meadow on either side the tiny stream. Dede clapped
her hands.

"It's sure prettier than office furniture," Daylight remarked.

"It sure is," she answered.

And Daylight, who knew his weakness in the use of the particular word
sure, knew that she had repeated it deliberately and with love.

They crossed the stream and took the cattle track over the low rocky
hill and through the scrub forest of manzanita, till they emerged on
the next tiny valley with its meadow-bordered streamlet.

"If we don't run into some quail pretty soon, I'll be surprised some,"
Daylight said.

And as the words left his lips there was a wild series of explosive
thrumming as the old quail arose from all about Wolf, while the young
ones scuttled for safety and disappeared miraculously before the
spectators' very eyes.

He showed her the hawk's nest he had found in the lightning-shattered
top of the redwood, and she discovered a wood-rat's nest which he