But how differently she looked around!  Her breaths were coming in a happy storm, her face crimsoning, her nostrils playing in trembling dilation.  In her eyes he saw open gates and a long vista of a fair highway in a glorious land; and the splendor of her was something near and yielding.  He sank down beside her.  Her hands stole into his; her head dropped on his shoulder; and he felt a warm and palpitating union with the very breath of her life.

“What do I see!” cried the Eternal Painter.  “Two human beings who have climbed up as near heaven as they could and seem as happy as if they had reached it!”

“We have reached it!” Jack called back.  “And we like it, you hoary-bearded, Olympian impersonality!”

Thus they watched the sun go down, gilding the foliage of their Little Rivers, seeing their future in the fulness and richness of the life of their choice, which should spread the oasis the length of that valley, and knowing that any excursions to the world over the pass would only sink their roots deeper in the soil of the valley that had given them life.

“Jack, oh, Jack!  How I did fight against the thing that was born in me that morning in the arroyo!  I was in fear of it and of myself.  In fear of it I ran from you that day you climbed down to the pine.  But I shan’t run again—­not so far but that I can be sure you can catch me.  Jack, oh, Jack!  And this is the hand that saved you from Leddy—­the right hand!  I think I shall always like it better than the left hand!  And, Jack, there is a little touch of gray on the temples”—­Mary was running her fingers very, very gently over the wound—­“which I like.  But we shall be so happy that it will be centuries before the rest of your hair is gray!  Jack, oh, Jack!”