at David would stand to that
lie forever. Of the two great passions that the woman had inspired the
one she had relinquished was the finer. He had stolen her from David,
and David had shown that for love of her he could forego vengeance.
Once such an act would have been inexplicable to the mountain man. Now
he understood, and in his humility he vowed to make the life she had
chosen as perfect as the one that might have been. Through this last,
and to him, supremest sacrifice, David ceased to be the puny weakling
and became the hero, the thought of whom would make Courant "go softly
all his days."

The summer marched upon them, with the men doing giant labor on the
banks and the women under the pine at work beside their children. The
peace of the valley was broken by the influx of the Forty-niners, who
stormed its solitudes, and changed the broken trail to a crowded
highway echoing with the noises of life. The river yielded up its
treasure to their eager hands, fortunes were made, and friendships
begun that were to make the history of the new state. These bronzed
and bearded men, these strong-thewed women, were waking from her sleep
the virgin California.

Sometimes in the crowded hours Susan dropped her work and, with her
baby in her arms, walked along the teeming river trail or back into the
shadows of the forest. All about her was the stir of a fecund earth,
growth, expansion, promise. From beneath the pines she looked up and
saw the aspiration of their proud up-springing. At her feet the ground
was bright with flower faces completing themselves in the sunshine.
Wherever her glance fell there was a busyness of development, a
progression toward fulfillment, a combined, harmonious striving in
which each separate particle had its purpose and its meaning. The
shell of her old self-engrossment cracked, and the call of a wider life
came to her. It pierced clear and arresting through the fairy flutings
of "the horns of elfland" that were all she had heretofore heard.

The desire to live as an experiment in happiness, to extract from life
all there was for her own enjoying, left her. Slowly she began to see
it as a vast concerted enterprise in which she was called to play her
part. The days when the world was made for her pleasure were over.
The days had begun when she saw her obligation, not alone to the man
and child who were part of her, but out and beyond these to the
diminishing circles of existences tha