mournfully. "That snow is
eaten through and through. See how those bits of ice drove into it. And
hear that running water. It will be off with a rush now. It's the very
last of it--all I shall have to look back to--that winter of ours
together." His tone was full of a meaning she dared not question. They
climbed in silence to the summer above and traversed, still silently,
the stretch of green woods that grew beyond the canyon wall. Only at the
first mountain meadow, a dazzle of emerald under the slanting sun, did
they halt to gaze at each other. His eyes were wonderfully alight with
sadness and rejoicing as she faced him, radiant in a moment of
forgetfulness, flagrant in her beauty's renewal.

"You're wonderful again," he said, almost whisperingly, "you're all in
flower now!" She quickened under his look, feeling the glow on her
cheeks. But that faded at his next words.

"I finished the last of those drawings to-day. Now I must go."

"Ah--go?" It was a little cry, half of question, half of understanding.

"Yes--I can go now. I couldn't go before, but I have the money now."

She sickened as they walked on in silence, fearing to question him, and
when they reached the camp she ran to throw herself on the bed in her
tent, covering her eyes with her hands, pressing the lids down, but
making no sound.

As they sat about their camp fire that evening Ewing was struck by a
certain view he caught of her. She sat in shadow on a stool at the foot
of a towering hemlock, and once when he rose to stir the waning fire a
flame shot up from a half-burned log, with a volley of sparks that fell
back in a golden rain. He glanced over to be sure that she escaped
these, and saw her sharply revealed in the sudden light, unconscious of
it, unaroused by the crackling explosion. She was staring fixedly into
the darkness, her body relaxed, her hands half clasped, her head, the
profile toward him, leaning wearily against the tree. Before this
background she seemed frail again, her face pallid under the dark of
her hair and against the rough, ruddy brown of the tree bole, her whole
body contrasting in its fragile lines with the tree's strength--human
weakness showing starkly against the vigor of the woods.

To dull the sudden wanting of his heart for her he walked off alone over
the path that bordered the lake, to reduce the amazing actuality of
things, if he could, to proportions seemly with normal life. But the
lake was a mirror of enchan