Bill Lang's store. She saw his
outspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go. But
they held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked his
way out on a shelf.

He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down at
him. It was the old story of their relations. Was this man ever to be
subjecting her to spasms of fear on his account? And there he was beaming
up at her reassuringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from her
face return in a hot flood. It brought with it anger in place of fear.

"I don't want it! I don't want it!" she cried down.

"And I want to get it for you! I want to get it for you--for you!" His
voice was a tumult of emotion in the abandon of passionate declaration.
So long had she held him back that now when the flood came it had the
power of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc. "There is
nothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!" he cried. "I'd like to
pull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered! I'd like to go
on doing things for you forever!"

There was not even a movement of her lips in answer. It seemed to her
now that there on the precipice edge, while he held her arm in his,
the iridescent house of glass had fallen about them in a confused,
dazzling shower of wreckage. He had found an opening. He had broken
through the barrier.

Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in a
daze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from beside
the pine before he reached as far as he could among the branches and,
with what seemed to her the refinement of effrontery and disregard of her
wishes, broke off a tawny young branch. He waved it to her--this garland
of conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw at
her feet from the lists.

"No, no, no!" she said, half aloud.

She saw him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging with
the lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing him
nearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon he
would be crunching the glass of the house under that confident tread; in
the ecstasy of a new part he would be before the opening he had broken in
the barrier with the jauntiness of one who expected admission. His
pulse-beat under the touch of her fingers at the precipice edge, his
artery-beat in the _arroyo_, was hammering in her temples, hammering out
a decision which, when