Don't you wish it would last forever?"

Her words were poor, ineffectual; but her look, her breathless voice made
up for their lack of originality. Once she said: "I never saw it so
lovely before; it is an enchanted land!" with no suspicion that the
larger part of her ecstasy arose from the presence of her young and
sympathetic companion. He, too, responded to the beauty of the day, of
the golden forest as one who had taken new hold on life after long
illness.

Meanwhile the Supervisor was calmly leading the way upward, vaguely
conscious of the magical air and mystic landscape in which his young folk
floated as if on wings, thinking busily of the improvements which were
still necessary in the trail, and weighing with care the clouds which
still lingered upon the tallest summits, as if debating whether to go or
to stay. He had never been an imaginative soul, and now that age had
somewhat dimmed his eyes and blunted his senses he was placidly content
with his path. The rapture of the lover, the song of the poet, had long
since abandoned his heart. And yet he was not completely oblivious. To
him it was a nice day, but a "weather breeder."

"I wonder if I shall ever ride through this mountain world as unmoved as
he seems to be?" Norcross asked himself, after some jarring prosaic
remark from his chief. "I am glad Berrie responds to it."

At last they left these lower, wondrous forest aisles and entered the
unbroken cloak of firs whose dark and silent deeps had a stern beauty all
their own; but the young people looked back upon the glowing world below
with wistful hearts. Back and forth across a long, down-sweeping ridge
they wove their toilsome way toward the clouds, which grew each hour more
formidable, awesome with their weight, ponderous as continents in their
majesty of movement. The horses began to labor with roaring breath, and
Wayland, dismounting to lighten his pony's burden, was dismayed to
discover how thin the air had become. Even to walk unburdened gave him a
smothering pain in his breast.

"Better stay on," called the girl. "My rule is to ride the hill going up
and walk it going down. Down hill is harder on a horse than going up."

Nevertheless he persisted in clambering up some of the steepest parts of
the trail, and was increasingly dismayed by the endless upward reaches of
the foot-hills. A dozen times he thought, "We must be nearly at the top,"
and then other and far higher ridges suddenly developed. Oc