There was a silence, during which Tisdale watched the pulling team.  Her manner of reminding him of his position was unmistakable, but it was her frequent reference to young Morganstein that began to nettle him.  Why should she wish specially to motor to Rainier with that black-browed, querulous nabob?  Why had she so often sailed on his yacht?  And why should she ever have been unhappy and hard-pressed, as she had confessed?  She who was so clearly created for happiness.  But to Tisdale her camaraderie with Nature was charming.  It was so very rare.  A few of the women he had known hitherto had been capable of it, but they had lived rugged lives; the wilderness gave them little else.  And of all the men whom he had made his friends through an eventful career, there was only Foster who sometimes felt the magnitude of high places,—­and there had been David Weatherbee.  At this thought of Weatherbee his brows clouded, and that last letter, the one that had reached him at Nome and which he still carried in his breast pocket, seemed suddenly to gather a vital quality.  It was as though it cried out:  “I can’t stand these everlasting ice peaks, Hollis; they crowd me so.”

Miss Armitage sat obliviously looking off once more across the valley.  The thunder-heads, denser now and driving in legions along the opposite heights, stormed over the snow peak and assailed the far, shining dome.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “see Rainier now!  That blackest cloud is lifting over the summit.  Rain is streaming from it like a veil of gauze; but the dome still shines through like a transfigured face!”

Tisdale’s glance rested a moment on the wonder.  His face cleared.  “If we were on the other side of the Cascades,” he said, “that weather-cap would mean a storm before many hours; but here, in this country of little rain, I presume it is only a threat.”

The bays began to round a curve and presently Rainier, the lesser heights, all the valley of Kittitas, closed from sight.  They had reached the timber belt; poplars threaded the parks of pine, and young growths of fir, like the stiff groves of a toy village, gathered hold on the sharp mountain slopes.  Sometimes the voice of a creek, hurrying down the canyon to join the Yakima, broke the stillness, or a desert wind found its way in and went wailing up the water-course.  And sometimes in a rocky place, the hoof-beats of the horses, the noise of the wheels, struck an echo from spur to spur.  Then Tisdale commenced to whistle cautiously, in fragments at first, with his glance on the playing ears of the colts, until satisfied they rather liked it, he settled into a definite tune, but with the flutelike intonations of one who loves and is accustomed to make his own melody.

He knew that this woman beside him, since they had left the civilization of the valley behind, half repented her adventure.  He felt the barrier strengthen to a wall, over which, uncertain, a little afraid, she watched him.  At last, having finished the tune, he turned and surprised the covert look from under her curling black lashes.