“You’re such a grand talker, Miss, that it’s hard running opposite to you, but I was brought up to think that a woman ought to be as near an angel as she could be.  I never answered my husband back, no matter what he said to me, and I moved here and there to suit him.  I was always waiting for him at home, and when he got there I stood ready to do for him in any way I could.  We was happy together, Miss, and when he was dying he said that I had been a good wife.  Them words repaid me, Miss, as having my own way never could.”

Clarinda Hays had grown fervid.  There were tears in her patient eyes, and her face was frankly broken with emotion.

Kate permitted a little silence to fall.  Then she said gently:—­

“I can see it is very sweet to you—­that memory—­very sweet and sacred.  I don’t wonder you treasure it.”

She let the subject lie there and arose presently and, in passing, laid her firm brown hand on Mrs. Hays’s work-worn one.

Wander was in the sitting-room and as she entered it he motioned her to get her hat and sweater.  She did so silently and accepted from him the alpenstock he held out to her.

“Is it right to leave Honora?” he asked when they were beyond hearing.  “I had little or nothing to do down in town, and it occurred to me that we might slip away for once and go adventuring.”

“Oh, Honora’s particularly well this morning.  She’s been reading a little, and after she has rested she is going to try to sew.  Not that she can do much, but it means that she’s taking an interest again.”

“Ah, that does me good!  What a nightmare it’s been!  We seem to have had one nightmare after another, Honora and I.”

They turned their steps up the trail that mounted westward.

“It follows this foothill for a way,” said Wander, striding ahead, since they could not walk side by side.  “Then it takes that level up there and strikes the mountain.  It goes on over the pass.”

“And where does it end?  Why was it made?”

“I’m not quite sure where it ends.  But it was made because men love to climb.”

She gave a throaty laugh, crying, “I might have known!” for answer, and he led on, stopping to assist her when the way was broken or unusually steep, and she, less accustomed but throbbing with the joy of it, followed.

They reached an irregular “bench” of the mountain, and rested there on a great boulder.  Below them lay the ranch amid its little hills, dust-of-gold in hue.

“I have dreamed countless times of trailing this path with you,” he said.

“Then you have exhausted the best of the experience already.  What equals a dream?  Doesn’t it exceed all possible fact?”

“I think you know very well,” he answered, “that this is more to me than any dream.”

An eagle lifted from a tree near at hand and sailed away with confidence, the master of the air.

“I don’t wonder men die trying to imitate him,” breathed Kate, wrapt in the splendor of his flight.  “They are the little brothers of Icarus.”