From the high levels they had reached, they looked down on clouds that glittered silver-white as snow-capped mountain-heads.  Among the rocks, where the ponies’ hoofs picked their way, wild flowers sprang, strange and lovely blossoms such as Angela had never seen; but Nick knew most of them by name.  Bird notes dropped like honey from fragrant shrubs and trees that hid the singers.  Squirrels with plumed tails, and chipmunks striped white, gray, and brown, raced across the trail, or peered with the bright beads they had for eyes from piles of dead wood that lay gray as skeletons among the living green of the mountain forest.  Far below, Silver Apron Fall splashed into the Emerald Pool and turned its green jewels to diamonds.  The near forests and faraway waters sang in the different voices the same song other waters and forests had sung yesterday; but this song of the High Sierra had wilder notes, above and beyond all knowledge of fleeting episodes such as human lives and civilizations.  For the song had not changed since the world was young.  The air was not mere air, but seemingly a conscious mingling of Divine Ether with the atmosphere.  Though they ascended always, it was as if they rode through the depths of a crystal sea, unstirred by their presence, a sea as deep and as high as heaven, a blue that took the solidity of turquoise between tree-trunks and paled to opaline fire across the canon.  Angela knew that never again, after these spacious days, could she go back to her old self.  She felt that she had mounted one step higher on the stage of development, and gained an ampler view.  It was easier now than it had been to see how Nick Hilliard had become what he was.  Nature, on the grandest scale and with the “grand manner,” she thought, had given him his education; had been for him at once schoolmistress, guide, and companion.  And no college built by man could give, for money, such knowledge as sky and wide spaces had given Nick for love.

Early in the afternoon the ponies brought them to the high plateau of Glacier Point, where, looking down, the world was a sea billowing with mountains, foaming with cataracts.

Angela was deliciously tired; and the long low hotel, built of logs, with a huge veranda, seemed to promise the welcome she wanted:  a cool, clean room, a warm bath, and afterward luncheon.  Also, she expected to find Kate.  Nick had wired, or telephoned, she was uncertain which; and though no answer had been received, Kate’s silence might no doubt be easily explained later.  Angela felt confident that she would have precisely the room she pictured; she rather hoped it would be white and green.

The manager met them on the veranda, but it was not the manager Nick had known.

“My name’s Hilliard,” Nick began.

“Oh, yes.  I ’phoned an answer to you at the Sentinel Hotel this morning.  Something wrong with the wire between us yesterday.”

“We must have started before you ’phoned.”