"It's the very last of winter," said Ewing mournfully. "That snow is eaten through and through. See how those bits of ice drove into it. And hear that running water. It will be off with a rush now. It's the very last of it—all I shall have to look back to—that winter of ours together." His tone was full of a meaning she dared not question. They climbed in silence to the summer above and traversed, still silently, the stretch of green woods that grew beyond the cañon wall. Only at the first mountain meadow, a dazzle of emerald under the slanting sun, did they halt to gaze at each other. His eyes were wonderfully alight with sadness and rejoicing as she faced him, radiant in a moment of forgetfulness, flagrant in her beauty's renewal.
"You're wonderful again," he said, almost whisperingly, "you're all in flower now!" She quickened under his look, feeling the glow on her cheeks. But that faded at his next words.
"I finished the last of those drawings to-day. Now I must go."
"Ah—go?" It was a little cry, half of question, half of understanding.
"Yes—I can go now. I couldn't go before, but I have the money now."
She sickened as they walked on in silence, fearing to question him, and when they reached the camp she ran to throw herself on the bed in her tent, covering her eyes with her hands, pressing the lids down, but making no sound.
As they sat about their camp fire that evening Ewing was struck by a certain view he caught of her. She sat in shadow on a stool at the foot of a towering hemlock, and once when he rose to stir the waning fire a flame shot up from a half-burned log, with a volley of sparks that fell back in a golden rain. He glanced over to be sure that she escaped these, and saw her sharply revealed in the sudden light, unconscious of it, unaroused by the crackling explosion. She was staring fixedly into the darkness, her body relaxed, her hands half clasped, her head, the profile toward him, leaning wearily against the tree. Before this background she seemed frail again, her face pallid under the dark of her hair and against the rough, ruddy brown of the tree bole, her whole body contrasting in its fragile lines with the tree's strength—human weakness showing starkly against the vigor of the woods.
To dull the sudden wanting of his heart for her he walked off alone over the path that bordered the lake, to reduce the amazing actuality of things, if he could, to proportions seemly with normal life. But the lake was a mirror of enchantment, the booming of an owl was a magic portent, the shadowed wall of granite was a turreted castle of mysteries, vague in the starlight, and the very stars themselves huddled down on him excitingly. He was in a world of the unreal, and must do an unreal thing. He stumbled blindly back to camp. He was surprised to find Mrs. Laithe as he had left her, still drooping against the rough-barked tree, weak, submissive, overborne. He touched her arm gently to recall her from some troubled distance. She looked at him with eyes unseeing at first.
"Isn't it bedtime?" he suggested.
She smiled and stood up to shrug away the spell of her dreaming. She spoke with such clear strength of tone that he was at once reassured of her vigor.