"Smoke," she said softly.
"No. I think not."
His tone had a touch of constraint, and a lone silence fell.
The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the enchantment of being alone in it together; and there was that in their hearts that made speech difficult.
They sat looking northward toward the moonlit hollow where the station camp clustered close to the forest's edge. Behind the camp—a mass of unbroken shadow—it climbed up and upward to the mystery of a sky, powdered with the gold-dust of faint stars, on which its jagged outline was printed black as ink. Beyond that again, one majestic snow-peak,—like a stainless soul rising out of a tomb,—gleamed in the light of an increasingly brilliant moon. The crowd round the bonfire had crumbled into a hundred insignificant seeming units; and the fire itself, no longer aspiring to the stars, glowed like an angry eye in the dusky face of the glade.
Presently Quita spoke.
"There is so endlessly much to say, that I don't know where to begin. And after all, I am utterly content just to feel that you are there; that I have really got you back at last."
"You have had me, body and soul, these five years," he answered simply. "It is I who have gained you, by some miracle of your womanhood that I shall never fathom."
"If you set it down to your own manhood, you might be nearer the mark. You are very much too humble, Eldred; and I love you for it,—always did."
"Always?"