gloriously spotless.
Where black shadows lay they but accentuated the whiteness across which
they fell.

Out of this sleeping, enchanted land, rising above it, sweeping across
it, a low voice like a whisper came to her, a whisper in her ears that
became a song in her heart. The snow that had, clung to the pines,
muting their needles and stilling their branches, had dropped on during
the day. Now the night wind which drove the clouds lingered through the
pine tops and set them swaying gently in the vast, harmonic rhythm which
is like the surging of a distant ocean. The everlasting whisper of the
pines, that ancient hushed voice which through the countless centuries
has never been still save when briefly silenced by the snow; which had
borne its message to Gloria when on that first day she went with Mark
King into the mountains; which many a time had mingled with her fancies,
tingeing them, leading her to dream of another life than that of city
streets; which now, suddenly, set chords vibrating softly in her own
bosom. All these days it had been stilled; had it called her ears would
have been deaf to it. But now insistently it bore a message to her, such
a message as from now on she would hear in the quiet voices of her
little camp-fire. To her, attuned by those varying emotions which
latterly had had their wills with her, it was the ancient call; the
summons back to the real things of his, to the bigness and the true
meaning of life. Rising in response to it, awakening in her own breast,
were the old human, instinctive influences, sprouting seeds in the blood
of her forbears. It was the eternal call of the mother earth that one
like Gloria must hear and hearken to and understand before she could set
firm feet upon the ashes of a vanquished self to rise to the true things
of womanhood. It was the

"... one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated--so:
Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges--
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"

Gloria understood. In her heart, lifting her eyes from the white glory
of the earth to the bright glory of the sky, she thanked God that she
understood.

Benny and the Italian were still alive and might be near? That did not
in any way affect the fact that there must be wood brought for King's
fire. She turned back for the rifle and the rope. She saw that King had
not stirred; that he seemed plunged in a deep, quiet sleep. She stood