Thus he drank her in before the crunch of a stone under his heel warned her of his presence and set her breaths going and coming in quick gusts as she wheeled around, half rising and then dropping back to a position as still as before, with a trace of new dignity in her grace, while her starkness of inquiry gradually changed to stoicism.

“Mary, I came upon you very suddenly,” he said.

“Yes”—­a bare, echoing monosyllable.

He stepped to one side to let Firio and his little cavalcade pass.  All the while she continued to look at him through the screen of her half-closed lashes in a way that set her repose and charm apart as something precious and cold and baffling.  Now he realized that he had made a breach in the barrier of their old relations only to find himself in a garden whose flowers fell to ashes at his touch.  He saw the light that enveloped her as an armor far less vulnerable than any wall, and the splendor of her was growing in his eyes.

Jag Ear’s bells with their warm and merry notes became a faint tinkle that was lost in the depths of the defile.  The two were alone on the spot where the Eternal Painter had introduced them so simply as Jack and Mary, and where he, as the easy traveller, had listened to her plead for his own life.  It was his turn to plead.  She was not to be won by fighting Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots.  That armor was without a joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the sun.  It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her visor as a passer-by in a gallery.  But one in armor does not fly from passers-by as she had flown while he was climbing up the canyon wall with his pine-tree branch.

“I have learned now to look over any kind of a precipice without getting dizzy,” she announced, quietly.

He was not the Jack who had come over the ledge in the energy of his passion yesterday to find her gone.  He had turned gentle and was smiling with craved permission for a respite from her evident severity as he dropped to a half-lying posture near her.  Overhead, the Eternal Painter was throwing in the smoky purple of a false thunderhead, sweeping it away with the promise of a downpour, rolling in piles of silver clouds and drawing them out into filmy fingers melting into a luminous blue.

“One can never tire of this,” he said, tentatively.

“To me it is all!” she answered, in an absorption with the scene that made him as inconsequential as the rocks around her.

“And you never long for cities, with their swift currents and busy eddies?” he asked.

“Cities are life, the life of humanity, and I am human.  I—­” The unfinished sentence sank into the silence of things inexpressible or which it was purposeless to express.

Her voice suggested the tinkle of Jag Ear’s bells floating away into space.  If a precipitate were taken from her forehead, in keeping with Jack’s suggestion to Dr. Bennington, it would have been mercury, which is so tangible to the eye and intangible to the touch.  Press it and it breaks into little globules, only to be shaken together in a coherent whole.  If there is joy or pain in the breaking, either one must be glittering and immeasurable.