"I am doing it because I want to do the hardest thing."
"A quibble!"
She set her lips, shut her eyes, even to the darkness, and tried to deafen her ears to the sounding thing. A long time she rode so. And then she wept because she was alone and cold and dying and unsuccored by the only one who could have comforted her.
"I would never, never have left you!" she called back toward Ewing, with the first reproach she had ever given him. Her voice had a broken sweetness like that of a child speaking through tears. "I'd never have let you be so cold! I'd have stayed—stayed by you—warmed you—comforted you!"
But after a little her tears ceased, as an unpitied child wears out its crying, and her eyes closed again as she laughed at her own sad lack of reason.
When she opened her eyes again she gave a little gasping cry of relief. The black of the night had faded to gray. A dull, dark, opaque gray it was, but ghosts of the land already bulked massively through it; shrouded, vague shapes without line. And the spirit of her purpose quickened as she looked.
Slowly the mist lightened, still opaque but silver now, and presently she saw the murky face of a nearby rock and could trace the cedar that twisted outward from its summit. They were amazing shapes to her, so long had she seemed to live in the dark, and she named them over, wonderingly—"A tree, a rock—a rock, a tree!"
Again the question struck at her: "You want to do the hardest thing?"
"I must do the hardest thing—it only happens that I also wish to."
"Is there nothing harder than what you are doing?"