"Oh, well, now, Emeline, young folks, will be young folks, you know." There was in John's voice something dangerously near satisfaction with this well-known peculiarity of youth.
"Yes; and they'll be old folks, too, which most of 'em seems to forget," returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after the retreating couple.
Mrs. Dysart was right. Sidney Palmerston and his companion were not thinking of old age that winter day. The mesa stretched a mass of purple lupine at their feet. There was the odor of spring, the warmth of summer, the languor of autumn, in the air. As they neared the cañon the path grew narrow, and the girl walked ahead, turning now and then, and blocking the way, in the earnestness of her speech. They had long since ceased to talk of the tunnel; Sidney had ceased even to think of it. For weeks he had hardly dared to think at all. There had been at first the keen sense of disappointment in himself which comes to every confident soul as it learns the limitations of its own will; then the determination, so easy to youth's foreshortening view, to keep the letter of his promise and bury the spirit out of his own sight and the sight of the world forever; then the self-pity and the pleading with fate for a little happiness as an advance deposit on the promise of lifelong self-sacrifice; then the perfumed days when thought was lulled and duty became a memory and a hope. Strangely enough, it was always duty, this unholy thing which he meant to do—this payment of a debt in base metal, when the pure gold of love had been promised. But ethics counted for little to-day as he followed a figure clad in blue serge down the path that led from the edge of the cañon to the bed of the stream. Budding willows made a green mist in the depths below them, and the sweet, tarry odors of the upland blew across the tops of the sycamores in the cañon and mingled with the smell of damp leaf-mould and the freshness of growing things.
The girl paused and peered down into the cañon inquiringly.
"Do you think of leaping?" asked Palmerston.
She smiled seriously, still looking down. "No; I was wondering if the rainfall had been as light in the mountains as it has been in the valley, and how the water-supply will hold out through the summer if we have no more."
Palmerston laughed. "Do you always think of practical things?" he asked.
She turned and confronted him with a half-defiant, half-whimsical smile.
"I do not think much about what I think," she said; "I am too busy thinking."
As she spoke she took a step backward and tripped upon some obstacle in the path.