ng face more closely. She stepped lightly across to the couch
and looked down at him, with a little air of carelessness against his
sudden awakening. It was the first time she had studied his face in
repose. Lacking the ready, boyish smile, it was an older face, revealing
lines of maturity she had not suspected in the arch of brow above the
deep-set eyes, in the lean jaws and sharply square chin, and in the
muscled neck, revealed by the thrown-back head. It was a new face, for
the unguarded faces of the sleeping, like the faces of the dead tell
many secrets. Ewing's face was all at once full of new suggestion, of
new depths, of unsuspected complexities. As she gazed, scarce breathing,
she was alive to a new consciousness of him. He had been a boy, winning
from her at once by his fresh, elemental humanness a regard that came
partly from the mother lying alert in her, and partly from the joyous,
willing and even wistful comrade which this woman was fitted to be. Now,
bending over the unmasked face, she divined with swift alarm that her
old careless attitude toward the sleeper might never be recovered. What
her new attitude must be she could not yet know, but she was conscious
of being swept by a great wave of tenderness for him; swept, too, by
fear of him; and the impact of these waves left her trembling before
him. Some flash of portent, some premonition born of instinct, warned
her with a clearness that was blinding. Tenderness and fear rolled in
upon her, though her reason weighed them as equal absurdities. Then her
look rose to the mother's portrait and she saw that the eyes had
followed her: they seemed now to challenge, almost fiercely. Only the
briefest of moments could she endure their gaze, a gaze that in some way
drew life to itself from the breathing of the sleeper. Instinctively she
brushed her hand before her own eyes, drew herself up with a little
flinching shudder and moved slowly backward to the door.

Then she was happily out in the sunlight, breathing deep of the
pine-spiced air, gratefully eying the familiar boundaries of the
clearing, the stumps, the huge pile of cut wood, and the fenced-in
vegetable garden. Over the line of green to the north a gray, bare
mountain shot above the lesser hills, rising splendidly from its
timbered base to a peak hooded in snow. It swam in her vision at first,
but presently something of its grounded sureness, something of the peace
that slept along its upper reaches, fell