"One can never tire of this," he said, tentatively.
"To me it is all!" she answered, in an absorption with the scene that made him as inconsequential as the rocks around her.
"And you never long for cities, with their swift currents and busy eddies?" he asked.
"Cities are life, the life of humanity, and I am human. I—" The unfinished sentence sank into the silence of things inexpressible or which it was purposeless to express.
Her voice suggested the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells floating away into space. If a precipitate were taken from her forehead, in keeping with Jack's suggestion to Dr. Bennington, it would have been mercury, which is so tangible to the eye and intangible to the touch. Press it and it breaks into little globules, only to be shaken together in a coherent whole. If there is joy or pain in the breaking, either one must be glittering and immeasurable.
"But Little Rivers is best," she added after a time, speaking not to him, but devoutly to the oasis of green.
In the crystal air Little Rivers seemed so near that one could touch the roofs of the houses with the fingertips of an extended arm, and yet so diminutive in the spacious bosom of the plateau that it might be set in the palm of the hand.
Jack was as one afraid of his own power of speech. A misplaced word might send her away as oblivious of him as a globule of mercury rolling free from the grasp. Here was a Mary unfathomed of all his hazards of study, undreamed of in all his flights of fancy.
"It is my last view," he began. "I have said all my good-bys in town. I am going."
Covertly, fearfully, he watched the effect of the news. At least now she would look around at him. He would no longer have to talk to a profile and to the golden mist of the horizon about the greatest thing of his life. But there was no sign of surprise; not even an inclination of her head.