pe this side of the pass and in
the face of shadows on the other side which he did not attempt to define.
To Firio he seemed to have grown taller and older.

XXII

"LUCK, JACK, LUCK!"

Apprehensively he watched the end of the ribbon running under P.D.'s
hoofs for the sight of a horsewoman breaking free of the foothills. The
momentary fear which rode with him was that Mary might be returning
earlier than usual. If they met on the road--why, the road was without
imagination and, in keeping with her new attitude toward him, she might
pass him by with a nod. But at the top of the pass imagination would be
supreme. There they had first met; there they had found their first
thought in common in the ozone which had meant life to them both.

He did not look up at the sky changes. As he climbed the winding path
worn by moccasined feet before the Persians marched to Thermopylae, his
mind was too occupied making pictures of its own in glowing anticipation
to have any interest in outside pictures. This path was narrow. Here, at
least, she must pause; and she must listen. Every turn which showed
another empty stretch ahead sent his spirits soaring. Then he saw a pony
with an empty side-saddle on the shelf. A few steps more and he saw Mary.

She was seated with the defile at her back, her hands clasped over her
knee. In this position, as in every position which she naturally took,
she had a pliant and personal grace. The welter of light of the low sun
was ablaze in her face. Her profile had a luminous wistfulness. Her
lashes were half closed, at once retaining the vision of the panorama at
her feet as a thing of atmospheric enjoyment and shutting it out from the
intimacy of her thoughts. And more enveloping than the light was the
silence which held her in a spell as still as the rocks themselves,
waiting on time's dispensation where time was nothing. Yet the soft
movement of her bosom with her even breaths triumphed in a life supreme
and palpitant over all that dead world.

Thus he drank her in before the crunch of a stone under his heel warned
her of his presence and set her breaths going and coming in quick gusts
as she wheeled around, half rising and then dropping back to a position
as still as before, with a trace of new dignity in her grace, while her
starkness of inquiry gradually changed to stoicism.

"Mary, I came upon you very suddenly," he said.

"Yes"--a bare, echoing monosyllable.

He stepped to one side