garments.
Thus he knew that the storm had served their miserable homes badly,
and he felt sorry for them.

For the most part they were heavy, frowsy creatures, slatternly and
uncouth. They came generally from the dregs of frontier cities, or
were the sweepings of the open country, gleaned in the debauched
moments of the men who protected them. Nor, as his eyes wandered in
their direction, was it possible to help a comparison between them and
the burden of delicate womanhood he held in his arms, a comparison
which found them painfully wanting.

He passed on under the bold scrutiny of those feminine eyes, but they
left him quite unconscious. His thoughts had drifted into a wonderful
dreamland of his own, a dreamland such as he had never visited before,
an unsuspected dreamland whose beauties could never again hold him as
they did now.

The sparkling sunlight which had so swiftly followed in the wake of
the storm, lapping up the moisture of the drenching earth with its
fiery tongue, shed a radiance over the familiar landscape, so that it
revealed new and unsuspected beauties to his wondering eyes. How came
it that the world, his world, looked so fair? The distant hills, those
hills which had always thrilled his heart with the sombre note of
their magnificence, those hills which he had known since his earliest
childhood, with their black, awe-inspiring forests, they were somehow
different, so different.

He traced the purple ridges step by step till they became a blurred,
gray monotony of tone fading away until it lost itself in the
glittering white of the snowcaps. Everything he beheld in a new light.
No longer did those hills represent the battle-ground where he and the
Padre fought out their meagre existence. They had suddenly become one
vast and beautiful garden where life became idyllic, where existence
changed to one long joy. The torrents had shrunk to gentle streams,
babbling their wonderful way through a fairy-land of scented gardens.
The old forceful tearing of a course through the granite hearts of the
hills was a thought of some long-forgotten age far back in the dim
recesses of memory. The gloom of the darkling forests, too, had passed
into the sunlit parks of delight. The rugged canyons had given place
to verdant valleys of succulent pasture. The very snows themselves,
those stupendous, changeless barriers, suggested nothing so much as
the white plains of perfect life.

The old harsh lines of life had p