“Oh,” he said, “don’t you know? Did you never feel, even in winter in Montreal, when you had skating-rinks, toboggan-slides, snow-shoe meets, and sleigh-rides to keep you amused, that it was all growing tiresome and very stale? Haven’t you felt that you wanted something—something you hadn’t got and couldn’t define—though you might recognize it when you found it?”
Once more Ida’s eyebrows straightened. He was going rather deeper than she had supposed him capable, though she was not altogether unacquainted with the restlessness he had described. Weston glanced at her face, and nodded.
“Well,” he said, “that’s very much what happens to the rancher and the track-grader every now and then; and when it does he goes up into the bush—prospecting. Still, I think you were wrong when you said that we seldom bring back anything. Did you bring nothing down with you from the quiet and the glimmering moonlight up yonder above the timber line?”
His companion looked up across the climbing forest to the desolation of rock and snow through which she had wandered with him a little while ago. It had been her first ascent, and she now felt the thrill of achievement and remembered how she had come down that apparently endless slope in the darkness. The feat looked almost impossible, by daylight. Then she remembered also how her nerves had tingled, and the curious sense of exaltation that had come over her as she crept along the dizzy edge of the great rock scarp in the moonlight, far above the unsubstantial ghosts of climbing trees. For the time being, it had proved stronger than weariness or the sense of personal danger, and she had a vague fancy that the memory of it would always cling to her.
“Yes,” she said, “I think I brought down something, or rather it attached itself to me. What is it?”
Weston spread out his hands with a boyish laugh.
“How should I know? Its glamour and mystery, perhaps. Still, though the prospector knows it, everybody can’t feel it. One must have sympathy. It would make itself felt by you.”
The girl’s face checked him. She felt that there was a subtle bond of mutual comprehension between her and this stranger; but she was not prepared to admit it to him; and he recognized that he had, perhaps, gone further than was advisable.
“Still,” he continued, “though it’s plainest up on the high peaks, the bush is full of it. You can recognize it everywhere. Listen!”
Ida did so. She heard the hoarse fret of the river, and the faint elfin sighing high up in the top of the firs.