The town was at their backs, and Keith wanted it there. He wanted to keep McDowell, and Shan Tung, and Miriam Kirkstone as far away as possible, until his mind rode more smoothly in the new orbit in which it was still whirling a bit unsteadily. More than all else he wanted to be alone with Mary Josephine, to make sure of her, to convince himself utterly that she was his to go on fighting for. He sensed the nearness and the magnitude of the impending drama. He knew that today he must face Shan Tung, that again he must go under the battery of McDowell's eyes and brain, and that like a fish in treacherous waters he must swim cleverly to avoid the nets that would entangle and destroy him. Today was the day—the stage was set, the curtain about to be lifted, the play ready to be enacted. But before it was the prologue. And the prologue was Mary Josephine's.
At the crest of a dip halfway down the slope they had paused, and in this pause he stood a half-step behind her so that he could look at her for a moment without being observed. She was bareheaded, and it came upon him all at once how wonderful was a woman's hair, how beautiful beyond all other things beautiful and desirable. In twisted, glowing seductiveness it was piled up on Mary Josephine's head, transformed into brown and gold glories by the sun. He wanted to put forth his hand to it, and bury his fingers in it, and feel the thrill and the warmth and the crush of the palpitant life of it against his own flesh. And then, bending a little forward, he saw under her long lashes the sheer joy of life shining in her eyes as she drank in the wonderful panorama that lay below them to the west. Last night's rain had freshened it, the sun glorified it now, and the fragrance of earthly smells that rose up to them from it was the undefiled breath of a thing living and awake. Even to Keith the river had never looked more beautiful, and never had his yearnings gone out to it more strongly than in this moment, to the river and beyond—and to the back of beyond, where the mountains rose up to meet the blue sky and the river itself was born. And he heard Mary Josephine's voice, joyously suppressed, exclaiming softly,
"Oh, Derry!"
His heart was filled with gladness. She, too, was seeing what his eyes saw in that wonderland. And she was feeling it. Her hand, seeking his hand, crept into his palm, and the fingers of it clung to his fingers. He could feel the thrill of the miracle passing through her, the miracle of the open spaces, the miracle of the forests rising billow on billow to the purple mists of the horizon, the miracle of the golden Saskatchewan rolling slowly and peacefully in its slumbering sheen out of that mighty mysteryland that reached to the lap of the setting sun. He spoke to her of that land as she looked, wide-eyed, quick-breathing, her fingers closing still more tightly about his. This was but the beginning of the glory of the west and the north, he told her. Beyond that low horizon, where the tree tops touched the sky were the prairies—not the tiresome monotony which she had seen from the car windows, but the wide, glorious, God-given country of the Northwest with its thousands of lakes and rivers and its tens of thousands of square miles of forests; and beyond those things, still farther, were the foothills, and beyond the foothills the mountains. And in those mountains the river down there had its beginning.
She looked up swiftly, her eyes brimming with the golden flash of the sun. "It is wonderful! And just over there is the town!"
"Yes, and beyond the town are the cities."
"And off there—"
"God's country," said Keith devoutly.
Mary Josephine drew a deep breath. "And people still live in towns and cities!" she exclaimed in wondering credulity. "I've dreamed of 'over here,' Derry, but I never dreamed that. And you've had it for years and years, while I—oh, Derry!"
And again those two words filled his heart with gladness, words of loving reproach, atremble with the mysterious whisper of a great desire. For she was looking into the west. And her eyes and her heart and her soul were in the west, and suddenly Keith saw his way as though lighted by a flaming torch. He came near to forgetting that he was Conniston. He spoke of his dream, his desire, and told her that last night—before she came—he had made up his mind to go. She had come to him just in time. A little later and he would have been gone, buried utterly away from the world in the wonderland of the mountains. And now they would go together. They would go as he had planned to go, quietly, unobtrusively; they would slip away and disappear. There was a reason why no one should know, not even McDowell. It must be their secret. Some day he would tell her why. Her heart thumped excitedly as he went on like a boy planning a wonderful day. He could see the swifter beat of it in the flush that rose into her face and the joy glowing tremulously in her eyes as she looked at him. They would get ready quietly. They might go tomorrow, the next day, any time. It would be a glorious adventure, just they two, with all the vastness of that mountain paradise ahead of them.