, with its tale of ever-living--made a
coloring of nice symbolism for her state.

Had she felt the need of a death's head at her sun feast, this neutral,
denying flatness would have sufficed. The end had come home to her. It
was her unseen familiar, voiceless, but ever present, with a look
unhurrying but constant.

And there were the mountains themselves, things that had once leaped
alive and tortured themselves into frenzied furies of striving only to
be stricken and left at last in all the broken tossing of their folly.
They had tried the fighting death, and it had availed only to fix their
last agonies. Their scarred hulks testified to the wisdom of submission.

Yet her mind was normal in these sun-warmed hours of musing. She knew
that those dead hills with their dying leafage told another tale to the
pair of young lives housed with her. To them they were but inspirations
to life vital and triumphant; eminences to be scaled in joyous effort,
offering to youth's dreaming, half-true clairvoyance, unending reaches
to provoke; near enough to seem attainable; far enough to be plausible
with promise of delights.

Nor did she fail to rejoice in the fervor of this fresh view so unlike
her own. She was conscious of its truth to untouched souls like theirs,
and she sought to throw them together, urging them to excursions through
the hills. She thought of them at first as her pair whom she had set in
a garden where the fruit of no tree was forbidden.

She coolly studied Ewing on the days when he worked indoors, detaching
herself from his life as one about to go on a long journey. From her
shadowed couch she scanned his face as he bent over the drawing board.
It had filled in the year since she first saw it, and was an older face,
the strength of it more conscious, the promise of it almost kept in its
well-controlled, level-eyed maturity. Much of the boy remained to flash
out, but she saw that this would never go; that it would kindle his eyes
when the brown hair had gone white. It was this eternal boyishness, she
saw, that made him quick of response to another's interest; this that
had made him seem too ductile under Teevan's manipulation, when in truth
he had merely been loath to hurt, fearing nothing so much as another's
pain. The forward line of the nose and the smoldering fierceness of eye
should have been more informing. That was the face, vital, fearless,
patently self-willed for all its kindly immaturities of concess