The vision shook her so that she rubbed her eyes and stared again to make sure.  It did not seem possible that she had actually wakened during the night and found him gone, and with this reality before her she was strongly tempted to believe that the coming of Nash was only a vivid dream.

“Morning, Anthony.”

He turned his head quickly and smiled to her.

“Hello, Sally.”

He was back at once, turning the bacon, which was done on the first side.  Seeing that his back was turned, she dressed quickly.

“How’d you sleep?”

“Well.”

“Where?”

He turned more slowly this time.

“You woke up in the middle of the night?”

“Yes.”

“What wakened you?”

“Nash and Kilrain.”

He sighed:  “I wish I’d been here.”

She answered:  “I’ll wash up; we’ll eat; and then off on the trail.  I’ve an idea that the two will be back, and they’ll have more men behind them.”

After a little her voice called from the outside:  “Anthony, have you had a look at the morning?”

He came obediently to the doorway.  The sun had not yet risen, but the fresh, rose-coloured light already swept around the horizon throwing the hills in sharp relief and flushing, faraway, the pure snows of the Little Brothers.  And so blinding was the sheen of the lake that it seemed at first as though the sun were about to break from the waters, for there all the radiance of the sunrise was reflected, concentrated.

Looking in this manner from the doorway, with the water on either side and straight ahead, and the dark, narrow point of land cutting that colour like a prow, it seemed to Anthony almost as if he stood on the bridge of a ship which in another moment would gather head and sail out toward the sea of fresh beauty beyond the peaks, for the old house of William Drew stood on a small peninsula, thrusting out into the lake, a low, shelving shore, scattered with trees.

Where the little tongue of land joined the main shore the ground rose abruptly into a shoulder of rocks inaccessible to a horse; the entrance and exit to the house must be on either side of this shoulder hugging closely the edge of the water.

Feeling that halo of the morning about them, for a moment Anthony forgot all things in the lift and exhilaration of the keen air; and he accepted the girl as a full and equal partner in his happiness, looking to her for sympathy.

She knelt by the edge of the water, face and throat shining and wet, her head bending back, her lips parted and smiling.  It thrilled him as if she were singing a silent song which made the brightness of the morning and the colour beyond the peaks.  He almost waited to see her throat quiver—­hear the high, sweet tone.

But a scent of telltale sharpness drew him a thousand leagues down and made him whirl with a cry of dismay:  “The bacon, Sally!”