than line--no, it's not like a drop-curtain, but it's
distinctly 'hand-painted.' All it needs is a stag surveying the prospect
from that great cliff. It's the kind of thing that would sound well in a
description. Oh, I assure you I intend to make lavish use of it, but it
leaves nothing to one's poor imagination!"

Peter had a distinct feeling of being annoyed. No, she could not
appreciate the mountains any more than they could appreciate her. They
were incongruous, antipathetic, antipodal. Kitty, in her pink and white
and flaxen prettiness and her trim habit, was in harmony with the
bridle-path of a city park; in this great, lonely country she was an
alien. He thought of Judith and the night they had climbed Horse-Thief
Trail, of her quiet endurance, her keen pleasure in the wild beauty of the
night, her quality of companionship, her loyalty, her silent bearing of
many burdens. Yet until he had seen them both against the same relentless
background, he had never been conscious of comparing the two women.

Nannie Wetmore had fallen behind. She was riding with a bronzed young
lieutenant from Fort Washakie. The two ahead rode long without speaking.
Then Peter broke the silence impatiently:

"You did not really mean that, did you?" He was boyishly hurt at her
flippant summing up of his beloved blue country. And Kitty, tired with the
long, hard ride, and missing that something in Peter that had always been
hers, turned on him a pair of blue eyes in which the tears were brimming
suspiciously. They were well out of sight of the others, and had come to
the heavy fringes of a pine wood. Was it the psychological moment at last?
Then suddenly their horses, that had been sniffing the air suspiciously,
stopped. Kitty's horse, which was in advance of Peter's, rushed towards
the thicker growth of pines as if all Bedlam were in pursuit. Peter's
horse, swerving from the cause of alarm, bolted back across the trail over
which they had just made their way. A large brown bear, feeding with her
cub, and hidden by the trees till they were directly in front of her, had
caused the alarm.

And presently the hush of the shadowy green world in which Judith lay was
broken by a light, sobbing sound. It had been so still that, lying on her
bed of pine-needles, she had likened it to great waves of silence, rolling
up from the valley, breaking over her and sweeping back again, noiseless,
green from the billowing ocean of pine branches, and sunlit. J