She sighed. “It seems so queer that they haven’t tried to find me. Do you suppose they think that I’m dead? Did Pete mail my letter to Miss Foby, I wonder?”
“What does Miss Foby matter?” he asked jealously. “What does anything matter to you but—me? Here we leave Pete’s trail and I take you straight up the mountain, dear one. We’ll rest now and then; when we get to the rocky place just below the top, I’ll carry you. Are you happy? I always feel as if my heart melted with the snow when spring comes—a wild, free, tumbling feeling of softness and escape.”
She sighed. “Yes—if only I could see. I miss my eyes out of doors more than in the house. Does snow-blindness really last so long? Perhaps it was the nervous shock and the exhaustion as much as the glare. I am sure it all will just go suddenly some day. I stare and stare sometimes, and I feel as if I might see—almost.”
He frowned. “You mustn’t miss anything when you have me, Sylvie. Do you suppose I miss anything, now that I have you? My career, my old friends, my old life, my liberty, the world? That for everything!” He snapped his fingers. “If only I have you.”
“You love me so much,” she answered, as though she were oppressed, “it frightens me sometimes.”
“When you are wholly mine—” he began. “Well, wait till we get to the top of the mountain; there I’ll tell you all my plans. They’re as big and beautiful as the world. I feel, with your love, that I can move mountains. I can fashion the world close to my heart’s desire. We’ll leave this blank spot and go to some lovely, warm, smiling land where the water is turquoise and the sky aquamarine—”
“And perhaps my sight will come back.” It was almost a prayer.
He did not answer. They had come to a sharp sudden ascent. He took her in his arms, scrambled across the tumbled rocks, and set her down beside him on the great granite crest that rose like the edge of a gray wave. The clean, wild wind smote her and shook her and pressed back her hair and dress. She clung to him.
“Is it steep? Are we on the edge of a cliff, Hugh? I’m not afraid!”
“We’re on the very top of the world,” he told her breathlessly, his voice filled with a sense of awe, “our world, Sylvie, I’m master here. There’s no greater mind than my own in all that dark green circle. It’s pines, pines, pines to the edge of the earth, Sylvie, an ocean of purple and green—silver where the wind moves, treading down, like Christ walking on the water. And the sky is all gray, like stone.”