He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flashing her independence.  Smilingly she looked down and smilingly and triumphantly back at him.

“You need not keep your arm up in that fashion ready to assist me.  It is tiring,” she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over the barrier.  “I am all right, now.  I don’t know what gave me that giddy turn—­probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze of the desert.”

He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she looked back into the abyss.

“I wish I had such courage,” he said with sudden, tense earnestness; “courage to master my revulsion against shadows.”

“Perhaps it will come like an inspiration,” she answered uncomprehendingly.

Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping.  Its sinking roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly persistence.  Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time.  So it had grown and set up housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had in a desert basin beside a water-course.

“The little pine has courage—­the courage of the dwarf,” she said.  “It is worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine.  How green it is—­greener than they!”

“But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!” he returned, to make controversy.

“Yes, out of the ease of their rich beds!”

“In a crowd and waiting for the axe!”

“And this one, in its isolation, creating something where there was nothing!  Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out of the stubborn soil!  And waiting all its life down there for the reward of a look and a word of praise!”

“But,” he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in rebuttal, “the big pines give us the masts of ships and they build houses and furnish the kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!”

“The little pine makes no pretensions.  It has done more.  It has given us something without which houses are empty:  It has given us a thought!”

“True!” he exclaimed soberly, yielding.  And now all the lively signals of the impulse of action played on his face.  “For your glance and your word of praise it shall pay you tribute!” he cried.  “I am going down to bring you one of its clusters of spines.”

“But, Jack, it is a dangerous climb—­it is late!  No! no!”

“No climb at all.  It is easy if I work my way around by that ledge yonder.  I see stepping-places all the way.”

How like him!  While she thought only of the pine, he had been thinking how to make a descent; how to conquer some physical difficulty.  Already he had started despite her protest.

“I don’t want to rob the little pine!” she called, testily.