"The Sphinx or the Pyramids, I'd guess," she offered.
"Naturally," he returned. "And what will you say when I introduce you to the Pharaoh who was a big, husky giant before Thebes was thought of?"
Again she looked to see a twinkle of jest in his eyes.
"Pharaoh?" she said. "Just a tree? Over two or three thousand years old!"
"By at least another thousand," he rejoined triumphantly. "And as staunch an old gentleman as you'll find."
Even Gloria, a poor little city-bred angel, must muse upon the statement. Having caught her interest he told her picturesquely of his old friends; how they had dwelt on serenely while peoples were born and empires rose and fell; while Rome smote Greece and both went down in the dust; while Columbus pushed his three boats across the seas; while the world itself passed from one phase to another; how they were all but co-eternal with eternity.
"When you think how these old fellows were a thousand years old when the Christ was a little boy," he ended simply, "you will begin to realize the sort of things they have a way of saying to you while you lie still and look up and up, and still up among their branches that seem at night to brush against the stars."
She let her fancies drift in the leash of his. But again they left the picturesque ancient trees and returned to him. A little smile touched her lips and was gone before he was sure of it; she was thinking that a man like King kept always in his heart something of the simplicity of a little child; she wondered if she herself, though so much younger in actual years, were not worlds more sophisticated. For his part King noted that she displayed to-day none of that chattering, singing gaiety of their former rides together; he remembered, sympathetically, that she had had very little sleep last night, and that she had endured a wearisome twenty-four hours before, and that the long, nervous strain under which she had struggled must certainly have told upon her, both physically and mentally. So, believing that she would be grateful for silence, he grew silent with her.
Further and ever further into the heart of the solitudes they rode through the quiet hours of the forenoon, with Gloria ever more abstracted and Mark King holding apart from her, doing her reverence, drinking always deep of that soft, sweet beauty which was hers. They forsook the creeks where the yellow-leaved aspens fluttered their myriad little gleaming banners; they made slow, zigzag work of climbing a flinty-sided mountain; they looked back upon green meadow and gay poplar grove far below; they galloped their horses across a wide table-land over which shrilled the wind, already sharpened by the season for the work it had to do before many weeks passed. Though there were some few level spaces, though now and then as King sought for her the easier way they rode down short slopes, with every mile put behind them they had climbed perceptibly. Already Gloria had the sensation of being by the world forgotten—though for her the world could not be forgot. A ridge from which they looked out across the peaks and valleys seemed to her like an island, lost, remote, eternally set apart from other people whom she knew, from all her life as she had lived it. She went on and on and felt like one in a dream, journeying into a fierce, rugged land over which lay a spell of enchantment, a spell that had been cast over it before King's all but immortal trees had burst from the seeds, so that now, while the outside world pulsed and beat with life, and swung back and forth with its pendulous progress, here all was unchanged, changeless.
King led her, well before midday, to the spot in which from the first he had planned that they would noon. A forest pool ringed with boulders, which were green with moss under the splashing of the water from above, where the swaying pines mirrored themselves and shivered in the little breeze which ruffled the clear, cold water. Here was a tiny upland meadow and much rich grass; here a sheltered spot where Gloria might sit in the sun and be protected from the colder air.