So she sat for a long moment, her eyes clinging for safety to the little volume in her hands.  Her fingers pressed it tightly, almost spasmodically, and upon them she seemed to feel, even to see, Nick Hilliard’s hands, brown and strong.  It was only her fancy; but it was not fancy that they burned to clasp hers.  She felt that longing of his, so vital, so passionate, creating the picture it desired.  Always before, when the thought had flashed into her mind, “He is beginning to love me,” she had thrust it away, shutting her mind against it.  But that was before her spirit was keyed to the high music of river and forest in the Yosemite Valley.  Since then she had passed from the twilight of little society shams and convenient, conventional self-deceivings into the glory where only Truth was visible or audible.

At last she was forced to lift her eyes, compelled by his.  She tried to look past him, straight into the sunset, a furnace that burned up human misgivings.  But her gaze was stopped on the way by Hilliard’s.

“May I read what you’ve written?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and gave him the book.  While he read, she drew in deep breaths, gathering strength against an emergency, if an emergency were to come.  But she hoped it would not.  She wanted, oh, so much! to keep him for a comrade—­for the comrade who had made this day the best day of her life.  She did not want to stop playing, because if it had come to earnest, deep realities, as she was afraid it must come now, there would be no place for Nick Hilliard in her future—­the future of Paolo di Sereno’s disillusioned wife.  “Still, here under these trees, I could tell him everything better than I could tell it anywhere else, and make him understand, and even forgive,” she thought.  “Without fear, I could let him know that I care for him, and that he has been the only man, except father, who has meant anything great to the real me.  Almost, I wish he would speak—­if he does love me.  And I know he does.”

But he lay reading the fancies she had written about the forest, and she could not guess how he was summoning his courage, as a general, surprised, summons his forces to battle.  She did not know how deep was his humility in thoughts of her, any more than she realized how utterly her first point of view had changed toward him, the “forest creature,” the “interesting, picturesque figure.”  So entirely was he a man, and the one man, that she had forgotten her old impersonal frame of mind.

He came to the last sentence in the book, broken short, where her pencil had stopped of itself.

“Thank you,” he said.  “I’m glad you feel those things about the forest.  It’s always been like that to me—­sacred.  If anything great and wonderful were to happen, I’d rather have it happen here than anywhere else.  Would you?”

Yes, it was coming! Suddenly she half wanted it to come—­this crisis in their lives; yet something made her push it away, just for a little while; not to have the end quite so soon, no matter how beautiful an end.