She would see Justin. He would approve her plans with enthusiasm. Together they would ski across the white wastes, they two alone in a vast world of mysterious stillness. The thin clear air of the high Rockies would carry their resonant voices like the chimes of bells. Silences would be significant, laughter the symbol of happy comradeship. For the first time they would come glowing through difficulties, perhaps dangers, conquered side by side. And at the end of the journey waited for them service, that which gave their joyous enterprise the value of an obligation.
And it was not at all like that—not a bit as she had day-dreamed it on the ride to Sweetwater Dam. The joy was struck dead in her heart. Miserably she realized that Justin could not understand. The ardent fire that burned in her soul seemed only mushy sentiment to him, on a par with the hysteria that made silly women send flowers to brutal murderers they did not know.
The bars were up between them. The hard look in his eyes meant anger. There would be no expression of it in temper. He was too self-contained for that. None the less it was anger. The reflection of it gleamed out from under her own dark lashes. She told herself she hated the narrowness in him that made him hold so rigidly to the well-ordered, the conventional thing. Why couldn’t he see that there was an imperative on her to live? Well, she would show him. Probably he thought that in every clash of will she ought to yield. He could learn his lesson just as well now as later.
She held her head high, but there was a leaden weight in her bosom that made her want to sob.
Often she had been proud of his tremendous driving power, the force that made of him a sixty-horse-power man. She resented it fiercely to-day. He was traveling just a little too fast for her, so that she could hardly keep up with him. But she would have fallen in her tracks rather than ask him to go slower.
Once the slither of his runners stopped. “Am I going too fast?” he asked coldly.
“Not at all,” she answered stubbornly.
He struck out again. They were climbing a long slope that ended in a fringe of timber. At the top he waited, watching her as she labored up heavily. The look he gave her when she reached him said, “I told you so.”
Before them lay a valley, beyond which was another crest of pines.
“How far now?” Betty asked, panting from the climb.