He paused trembling, as before a judge.  She turned quickly, with a sudden, winsome vivacity, the glow of a great satisfaction in her eyes and smiling a comradeship which made her old attitude over the wall a thing of dross and yet far more intimate.  Her hand went out to meet his.

“Jack, we have had good times together,” she said.  “We were never mawkish; we were just good citizens of Little Rivers, weren’t we?  And, Jack, every mortal of us is partly what he is born and the rest is what he can do to bend inheritance to his will.  But we can never quite transform our inheritance and if we stifle it, some day it will break loose.  The first thing is to face what seems born in us, and you have made a good beginning.”

She gave his hands a nervous, earnest clasp and withdrew hers as she rose.  So they stood facing each other, she in the panoply of good will, he with his heart on his sleeve.  The swiftly changing pictures of the Eternal Painter in his evening orgy seemed to fill the air with the music of a symphony in its last measures, and her very breaths and smiles to be keeping time with its irresistible movement toward the finale.

“I must be starting back, Jack,” she said.

“And, Mary, I must learn how to master the millions.  Oh, I have not the courage of the little dwarf pine in the canyon!  Mary, Mary, I calloused my hands for you!  I want to master the millions for you!  I would give you the freedom of Little Rivers and all the cities of the world!”

“No, Jack!  This is my side of the pass.  I shall be very happy here.”

“Then I will stay in Little Rivers!  I will leave the millions to the shadows!  I will stay on ranch-making, fortune-making.  Mary, I love you!  I love you!”

There was no staying the flame of his feeling.  He seized her hands; he drew her to him.  But her hands were cold; they were shivering.

“Jack!  No, no!  It is not in the blood!” she cried in the face of some mocking phantom, her calmness gone and her words rocking with the tumult of emotion.

“In the blood, Mary?  What do you mean?  What do you know that I don’t know?  Do you know those shadows that I cannot understand better than I?” he pleaded; and he was thinking of the Doge’s look of pity and challenge and of the meeting long ago in Florence as the hazy filaments of a mystery.

“No, I should not have said that.  What do I know?  Little—­nothing that will help!  I know what is in me, as I know what is in you.  I am afraid of myself—­afraid of you!”

“Mary, I will fight all the shadows!” He drew her close to him resistlessly in his might.

“Jack, you will not use your strength against me!  Jack!”

He saw her eyes in a mist of pain and reproach as he released her.  And now she threw back her head; she was smiling in the philosophy of garden nonsense as she cried: 

“Good-by, Jack!  Luck against the dinosaur!  Don’t press him too hard when he is turning a sharp corner.  Remember he has a long reach with his old paleozoic tail.  Luck!” with a laugh through her tears; a laugh with tremulous cheer in it and yet with the ring of a key in the lock of a gate.