Tisdale laughed again mellowly.  “Then it’s all right.  We are going to see this trip through.  But I wish I could show you that Alaska mountainside in midsummer.  Imagine violets on violets, thousands of them, springing everywhere in the vivid new grass.  You can’t avoid crushing some, no matter how carefully you pick your steps.  There’s a rocky seat half-way up on a level spur, where you might rest, and I would fill your lap with those violets, big, long-stemmed ones, till the blue lights danced in your eyes.”

They were doing that now, and her laugh fluted softly through the wood.  For that moment the barrier between them lost substance; it became the sheerest tissue, a curtain of gauze.  Then the aloofness for which he waited settled on her.  She looked away, her glance again seeking the stream.  “I can’t imagine anything more delightful,” she said.

A rough and steep breadth of road opened before them, and for a while the bays held his attention, then in a better stretch, he felt her swift side-glance again reading his face.  “Do you know,” she said, “you are not at all the kind of man I was led to expect.”

“No?” He turned interestedly, with the amusement shading the corners of his mouth.  “What did you hear?”

“Why, I heard that you were the hardest man in the world to know; the most elusive, shyest.”

Tisdale’s laugh rang, a low note from the depths of his mellow heart.  “And you believed that?”

She nodded, and he caught the blue sparkles under her drooping lids.  “You know how Mrs. Feversham has tried her best to know you; how she sent you invitations repeatedly to dinner or for an evening at Juneau, Valdez, Fairbanks, and you invariably made some excuse.”

“Oh, but that’s easily explained.  Summers, when she timed her visits to Alaska, I was busy getting my party into the field.  The working season up there is short.”

“But winters, at Seattle and in Washington even, it has been the same.”

“Winters, why, winters, I have my geological reports to get in shape for the printer; interminable proofs to go over; and there are so many necessary people to meet in connection with my work.  Then, too, if the season has been spent in opening country of special interest, I like to prepare a paper for the geographical society; that keeps me in touch with old friends.”

“Old friends,” she repeated after a moment.  “Do you know it was one of them, or rather one of your closest friends, who encouraged my delusion in regard to you?”

“No, how was it?”

“Why, he said you were the hardest man in the world to turn, a man of iron when once you made up your mind, but that Mrs. Feversham was right; you were shy.  He had known you to go miles around, on occasion, to avoid a town, just to escape meeting a woman.  And he told us—­of course I can repeat it since it is so ridiculously untrue—­that it was easier to bridle a trapped moose than to lead you to a ballroom; but that once there, no doubt you would gentle fine.”