Duncan Mallison grinned delightedly.
“Thanks! I’ll tell him what you said.”
CHAPTER XXIII
A mighty panorama of golden hills swelled like waves on all sides and vanished into cloud-like outlines of yet higher hills that zigzagged across the horizon and merged in the west into that matchless chain of rugged peaks. Snow crowned, rosy under the caress of the slowly sinking sun, bathed in a mystic veil of gilded splendour, the Canadian Rockies were printed like an immense masterpiece across the western sky.
Hilda rode slowly along, her gaze pinned upon the hills. Yet of them she was thinking but vaguely. They were a familiar and well-loved presence that had been with them always. To them she had turned in all her girlish troubles. To them she had whispered her secrets and her dreams.
As she rode on and on, her thoughts were all of those strange evenings in the company of this man—the too-short, electrical half hour or so when they would be alone together before her father awoke.
Her reins hung loose over her horse’s neck; her hands were in the pockets of her hide coat; her head slightly bent, Hilda gave herself up to a long, aching, yet singularly glowing day dream. Daisy made her own trail, idly loping along above the canyon that skirted the Ghost River, stopping now and then to nibble at the sweet grass along the paths.
The woods were very still and lovely. Wide searchlights of the remaining sunshine pierced through the branches of the trees and flickered in and out of the woods, playing in golden, dancing gleams upon the green growth.
Brown and gold, deeply red, burnt yellow, and green, the trees were freighted with glorious beauty. Masses of the leaves fluttered idly to the ground, moved by the soft fragrant breeze and the branches on bush and tree seemed lazily to shake themselves, as if succumbing unwillingly to the slumberous spell of the quiet Autumn day.
The flowers beneath the trees still shone, their radiance but slightly dulled by the touch of the night frosts, seeming lovelier indeed, as if veiled by some softening web-like touch. Scarlet and bright, all through the wooded growth, the wild-rose berries grew.