had come down to him
while he deemed her fast asleep!

"Gloria!" he cried.

A more radiantly lovely Gloria he had never looked upon. She had slept
and rested; she had bathed and groomed and set herself in order. She was
dressed after a fashion to bewilder a mere man in the only utterly
ravishing outing costume Mark King had ever seen. He felt insanely
inclined to pick up her little boots, one after the other, and go down
on his knees and kiss them; her hat was a flopsy turban, from under the
brim of which the most adorable of golden-brown curls half escaped to
throw kiss-shadows on her rosy cheeks. And Gloria's eyes!

This time there was no door between them, nor even the memory of a
door. He gathered her up into his arms so that her boot-heels swung
clear of the floor.

"Do you know ... do you guess ... have you the faintest suspicion how I
love you?"

"The--the coffee!" gasped Gloria. "It's boiling over!"

He laughed joyously at that, and finally, when he had set her down,
Gloria, bright and flushed, laughed too.

"Burning bacon last night, boiling coffee this morning!" he chuckled.
And then, there in the kitchen, they sat down to breakfast. "It's sweet
of you," he told her softly, "to get up and come down and see me off."

"Oh," said Gloria, "I am going with you."

Not once had King dared think of a thing like that. He had thought that
at best he would be with her again in four or five days. But that she
should go with him into the mountains on this quest of his? He sat and
pondered and stared at her.

"Don't you want me?" asked Gloria. "Aren't you glad, Mark?"

She was serenely prepared for objections, should they be forthcoming.
For it was not on any spur of the moment, but after long deliberation,
that she had decided that she would go with him. She wanted no scandal
in the papers; she meant that there should be none. If it were rumoured
that she had gone out of town with Gratton; if Gratton wanted to be ugly
and feed rumour; then on top of that if she appeared within reach of a
reporter without a husband, there would be talk. If it were answered
that she was married to Mark King, there would be the question: "And
where, my dear, is this Mark King?" Those girl friends in San Francisco
who had met him at her birthday-party would be fairly squirming with
excited curiosity to know _everything_. Among themselves they would make
insinuations about the Bear Tamer or the Animal Trainer, as Gloria knew
that