She could not sleep that night. Every twig and every needle of her pine mattress seemed to have conspired to torture her. She tossed about until she could no longer endure her bed; and in the middle of the night 125 she crept out of the tent, and sat, wrapped in a blanket, before the smouldering embers of the fire. The hobbled horses grazed not far away; a night bird twitted solitarily in the brush; and from the depths of the forest came the scream of some savage creature out on its kill. Against the star-crowded sky the peaks stood up cold and impassive. What cared they? What did the world care? What did Philip care?

For now she knew that she loved him. Yes, yes, she loved him! In her heart she had known it from the beginning, since that meeting in the Forbidden Pasture, had known it as one knows things without acknowledgment. Her mind had acknowledged only the hundred reasons why she should not, could not love him. He had repelled her; he had not veiled his meaning, had not concealed his antagonism; he had told her plainly, brutally almost, that he would not endure her presence, that she must avoid his side of the Park.

Then she thought of Robert,––Robert, so devoted and so true. What was she doing: throwing away his love that was so unselfishly, so whole-heartedly laid at her feet? Had she been mad to flee from him? Yes, mad! Pride rose to support the fondness and the admiration she had felt for him. And so there ensued a struggle between the two fine spirits that dwelt in her,––the proud little lady of the Fragonard and the Viking with red hair.

The Viking won. Had not her father said to her, in those long talks about her mother, that love is the only thing? And back she came, on swiftest wings of passion, to Philip; and she was glad. She knew now the meaning of her restlessness in the dark days in the 126 unheeding city; she knew whose voice had called, whose arms had held her, though he was unaware. He needed her, though he did not know it. And she had come to him, without understanding. Somewhere she had read a fugitive bit of verse that had meant nothing then, and had been forgotten until now, when it suddenly sang across the years and the spaces like a call to courage:

“The wild wind bloweth
The cross of fire.
The wild heart knoweth
Its own desire.”

The wild heart knoweth its own desire! She rose to her feet with a singing and a resurrection of her heart. She scarcely knew that her limbs were stiff and that her body ached with cold. Her spirit was aroused. She could not go and take Philip as her father had taken the one he loved. But there were ways; when had a woman ever failed, in love, of finding them? She set herself to thinking, planning, scheming, while she walked swiftly to and fro before the tents. And presently she stopped her pacing, and looked curiously around her. There had come a subtle alteration in the aspect of the night. A shivering freshness had crept insensibly into the air. Leaves and grass and the very air appeared to be astir, though the silence and the darkness were as before. She looked up eagerly at the sky, and saw that the stars were pale. It was not yet the dawn; it was only the passing of the night. But the dawn was near. The dawn! The dawn!

She did not wish Seth to find her there. He would ask questions, staring at her. She crept stealthily back 127 into her tent, and lay there, shaking with cold, to wait for the noise that Huntington would make as he sought for live embers in the ashes of the fire.

Once out of the mountains and in the foothills, she rode far ahead of Seth and Claire, impatient at the slow progress necessitated by the difficulties of the pack horses. Late in the afternoon she found herself at a fork of the road with which she was familiar. A little way up the less-used of the two branches there was a glade where columbines grew in extraordinary profusion. She had gathered armloads of them there, and seemed scarcely to have touched the edge of that wild garden where nature had been seized with a prodigal impulse. And now, rather to be doing something than to await in irritation for Seth and Claire, she turned her pony’s head and rode toward the glade. In five minutes she was fording a little stream, beyond which the road rose slightly to cross the shoulder of a hill, and dipped again to run in a sharp curve along the margin of the glade. She took the rise at a gallop, sped down the other slope, and at the curve of the road reined up her horse with a startled cry. She had come suddenly upon a team hitched at the side of the road,––the sorrels and the trap in which Philip Haig had driven her to Huntington’s that terrible evening.

For a moment she was bereft of thought and feeling. At that very instant she had been thinking of him; what instant was she not thinking of him? But the utterly unexpected encounter––for he was there somewhere, in the glade, no doubt––swept away all that courage she had found on Avalanche. She felt suddenly helpless, 128 inert, afraid; and before she could regain her self-possession, call back her high resolve, the bushes at the roadside parted, and Philip stood before her. He bore a great bouquet of columbines, their stems wrapped in damp moss and leaves and tied securely with a string. At sight of her he halted; and that look of annoyance she had seen him wear in the road below his ranch house came again into his pale face. For some seconds they regarded each other in silence.