"I, too, am living the hermit life for the summer. I am the happy possessor of a throat that demands an annual mountain-cure. Switzerland with its perpetual spectacular note gets on my nerves, so last year we found this region—I and my two faithful old servitors. Do you know the abandoned tannery in the West Branch Clove? That has been fitted up for our use, and there we live the simple life as I am able to attain it—but you have so far outdone me that you have filled my soul with discontent!"
"Alas," said the man, "you have served me the very same trick! I could almost wish—"
"That I had not come!"
"Say, rather, that you would come again!"
She stood up and reached for her sweater, waiting for him to open the door. The round of the little valley was a glittering green bowl filled with pink cloud scuds. They stepped out into a jubilant world washed clean and freshly smiling. She put out her hand in good-bye.
"I almost think I shall come again! If you were a person with whom one could be solitary—who knows!"
When she appeared the next time she found him by the noise of his chopping. They climbed to the top of the moss-covered boulder that hangs poised over the ledge where the stream leaps into the abyss. Below them the hills rolled in an infinite recession of leaf-clad peaks to the sky line, where they melted to a blur of bluish-green mist.
"Oh, these mountains of America!" she cried, "their greenness is a thing of dreams to us who know only bare icy and alps!"
"Far lovelier," he said, "to look down upon than to look up to, I think. To be a part of the height comes pretty near to being happy, for the moment."
She turned from the view to study her companion. The lines in the corners of his kind, tired eyes, the lean, strong figure, hair graying about the temples. He grew a little impatient under it before she spoke.