In time she came to the bench beside the torrent where she and Wander had rested that other, unforgettable day.  She paused there now for a long time, for the path was steep and the altitude great.  The day had turned gray and a cold wind was arising—­crying wind, that wailed among the tumbled boulders and drove before it clouds of somber hue.

After a time she went on, and as she mounted, encountering ever a steeper and more difficult way, she tore the leather of her shoes, rent the skirt of her traveling-frock, and ruined her gloves with soil and rock.

“If I have to go back as I came, alone,” she reflected, “all in tatters like this, to find that he is at the mines or the village, attending to his work, I shall cut a fine figure, shan’t I?  The very gods will laugh at me.”

She flamed scarlet at the thought, but she did not turn back.

Presently she came to a place where the path forked.  A very narrow, appallingly deep gorge split the mountain at this point, each path skirting a side of this crevasse.

“I choose the right path,” said Kate aloud.

Her heart and lungs were again rebelling at the altitude and the exertion, and she was forced to lie flat for a long time.  She lay with her face to the sky watching the roll of the murky clouds.  Above her towered the crest of the mountain, below her stretched the abyss.  It was a place where one might draw apart from all the world and contemplate the little thing that men call Life.  Neither ecstasy nor despair came to her, though some such excesses might have been expected of one whose troubled mind contemplated such magnificence, such terrific beauty.  Instead, she seemed to face the great soul of Truth—­to arrive at a conclusion of perfect sanity, of fine reasonableness.

Conventions, pettiness, foolish pride, waywardness, secret egotism, fell away from her.  The customs of society, with what was valuable in them and what was inadequate, assumed their true proportions.  It was as if her House of Life had been swept of fallacy by the besom of the mountain wind.  A feeling of strength, courage, and clarity took possession of her.  There was an expectation, too,—­nay, the conviction,—­that an event was at hand fraught for her with vast significance.

The trail, almost perpendicular now, led up a mighty rock.  She pulled herself up, and emerging upon the crown of the mountain, beheld the proud peaks of the Rockies, bare or snow-capped, dripping with purple and gray mists, sweeping majestically into the distance.  Such solemnity, such dark and passionate beauty, she never yet had seen, though she was by this time no stranger to the Rockies, and she had looked upon the wonders of the Sierras.  She envisaged as much of this sublimity as eye and brain might hold; then, at a noise, glanced at that tortuous trail—­yet more difficult than the one she had taken—­which skirted the other side of the continuing crevasse.