“I always hope,” replied Wander, “when I hear of an aviator who has been killed, that he has had at least one perfect flight, when he soared as high as he wished and saw and felt all that a man in his circumstances could.  Since he has had to pay so great a price, I want him to have had full value.”

“It’s a fine thing to be willing to pay the price,” mused Kate.  “If you can face whatever-gods-there-be and say, ’I’ve had my adventure.  What’s due?’ you’re pretty well done with fears and flurries.”

“Wise one!” laughed Wander.  “What do you know about paying?”

“You think I don’t know!” she cried.  Then she flushed and drew back.  “The last folly of the braggart is to boast of misfortune,” she said.  “But, really, I have paid, if missing some precious things that might have been mine is a payment for pride and wilfullness.”

“I hope you haven’t missed very much, then,—­not anything that you’ll be regretting in the years to come.”

“Oh, regret is never going to be a specialty of mine,” declared Kate.  “To-morrow’s the chance!  I shall never be able to do much with yesterday, no matter how wise I become.”

“Right you are!” said Wander sharply.  “The only thing is that you don’t know quite the full bearing of your remark—­and I do.”

She laughed sympathetically.

“Truth is truth,” she said.

“Yes.”  He hung over the obvious aphorism boyishly.  “Yes, truth is truth, no matter who utters it.”

“Thanks, kind sir.”

“Oh, I was thinking of the excellent Clarinda Hays.  I listened to your conversation this morning and it seemed to me that she was giving you about all the truth you could find bins for.  I couldn’t help but take it in, it was so complacently offered.  But Clarinda was getting her ’sacred feelings’ mixed up with the truth.  However, I suppose there is an essential truth about sacred feelings even when they’re founded on an error.  I surmised that you were holding back vastly more than you were saying.  Now that we ’re pretty well toward a mountain-top, with nobody listening, you might tell me what you were thinking.”

Kate smiled slowly.  She looked at the man beside her as if appraising him.

“I’m terribly afraid,” she said at length, “that you are soul-kin to Clarinda.  You’ll walk in a mist of sacred feelings, too, and truth will play hide and seek with you all over the place.”

“Nonsense!” he cried.  “Why can’t I hear what you have to say?  You stand on platforms and tell it to hundreds.  Why should you grudge it to me?”

She swept her hand toward the landscape around them.

“It has to do with change,” she said.  “And with evolution.  Look at this scarred mountain-side, how confused and senseless the upheavals seem which have given it its grandeur!  Nor is it static yet.  It is continually wearing down.  Erosion is diminishing it, that river is denuding it.  Eternal change is the only law.”