She watched them out, waving her hand and smiling an answer to her baby's repeated "Good-by." Then she turned and went up from the landing. "If it was a way," she said under her breath, "then I have let it go."
She walked in the direction of the mills, on past the last cabins, to the beginning of a path that zigzagged up the side of the promontory. She pushed up quickly, finding in the tangible difficulty of the ascent relief for her hot thoughts. Sometimes the earth gave under her and she sprang to a spur of rock; she grasped the tough, springy boughs of young firs to ease her weight. She invited the touch of the prickly needles on her hands and face, and she drew full breaths of the fragrance exhaled from her palms.
She gained the summit moist and panting, and paused to look down on the rowboat, and on across the harbor to the infant city on her hills. There was no dwelling near; the trail took the contour of the bluff, which in places became a precipice, and everywhere around her stretched the forest or the sea. She crossed to the westward side and stopped where a fallen hemlock had cut a swathe through the timber, creating an unobstructed view. Out of the smoke film that shrouded the distant shore, rising columns parted in dun rolling clouds, showing where the forest fires burned; but the Olympics reared their giant heads from the pall, sometimes thrusting a shoulder through. And to this woman it was not solitude; she had come into the presence of old friends. She turned her eyes to that grand company of peaks and forgot the narrow limits of the life below the bluff; she stood above the drift and shadow and, for a moment, Philip.
Her hands were clasped loosely behind her; her lifted head exposed the beautiful lines of throat and chin; her breath came a little hard and quick and there was a soft color in her cheeks. The likeness to her sister had never seemed as marked to Forrest as it was then, when he came upon her unexpectedly, by the fallen hemlock, on his way to the mills. Was not this the trail to the headwaters? Had they not paused to choose a way through the windfall?
She did not see him, and he waited, mastered by that brief illusion. And while he watched her face she saw the heights of the Olympics change from rose to burnished brass; every peak and spur flamed a signal to the departing sun.
"'But breathe the air of mountains
And their unapproachable summits will lift thee
to the level of themselves.'"
She repeated the words softly with a clear modulation, deepening to a contralto note, and after a moment added a preceding line.
"'Assert thyself; rise up to thy full height.'"
But there she stopped, and lifting her arms with a little outward gesture, expressive of futile effort, let them drop, and turning her face, saw Forrest.
He came forward quickly to say, "I've only been here a moment, and I couldn't help listening; I'm fond of those lines. But, when did you ever assert yourself?" He looked down at her with his smile of the eyes. "It's there the resemblance stops."