There was another silence, then suddenly she lifted her head.  “I am sorry,” she said, “but it is all over.  I shall try my best not to annoy you any more.”

“Annoy me?  Why, you haven’t.  What makes you think that?” Tisdale turned, and the mellowness stole into his voice.  “I didn’t expect you to creep in and go to sleep tranquilly alongside that bunch of sage.”

At this she smiled.  “You have found a flower to fit even her.”

“I never made a misfit—­yet,” he answered and waited, looking into her face, reading her through.

“But you have doubts,” she supplemented, “and I warned you I should disappoint you.  I warned you at the start.”

Tisdale laughed again, softly.  “The odds were all against that Alaska violet,” he said, “but she weathered it through.”  And seating himself on the steps, he looked up again to the night-enshrouded Pass.  The air was cooler; a light wind, drawing down from the divide, brought a hint of dampness; it was raining somewhere, far off.  “My doubts are all right,” he added, “and I am going to stay here as long as you want me to.”

CHAPTER VIII

THE BRAVEST WOMAN HE EVER KNEW

Presently, during one of the interludes when darkness enveloped the gulf, she began to entertain Tisdale with an experience in the Sierras, a little adventure on one of those journeys with her father, when she had driven Pedro and Don Jose.  But though she told the story with composure, even with a certain vivacity and charm, as she might have narrated it to a small and intimate audience in any safe drawing-room, her self-control was a transparency through which he saw her anxiety manoeuvering, in spite of his promise, to keep him there.

“Strange, is it not?” she went on, “how things will take the gloss of humor, looking back.  That cloudburst was anything but funny at the time; it was miserably exasperating to stand there drenched, with the comfortable quarters of the mining company in sight, cut off by an impassable washout.  And it was wretched driving all those miles to our hotel in wet clothes, with not so much as a dry rug to cover us; yet afterwards, whenever I tried to tell about it, I failed to gain a shred of sympathy.  People laughed, as you are doing now.”

“And you laughed with them,” answered Tisdale quickly, “because looking back you caught the right perspective.  It is always so.  Another incident that seemed trivial in passing will loom up behind us like a cliff on the horizon.  And it is so with people.  The man who held the foreground through sheer egoism sinks to his proper place in obscurity, while a little, white-faced woman we knew for a day stands out of the past like a monument.”

His brows clouded; he turned from the lantern light to look off again to the shrouded mountain tops.  “And looking back,” he added, “the man you thought you knew better than the rest, the partner, friend, to whom, when you were reminded and it suited your convenience, you were ready to do a service, stands out from the shadows clearly defined.  It is under the test of those high lights behind that his character shines.  You wonder at his greatness.  His personality takes a stronger, closer hold, and you would give the rest of your life just to go back and travel the old, hard road again with him.”