“There comes the cable-car, climbing up to get us,” she said faintly.  “And we will go down from this high place of safety into that dark plain, and we will have to cross it, painfully, step by step. Dare you promise me we will not lose our way?” she challenged him.

“I don’t promise you anything about it,” he answered, taking her hand in his.  “Only I’m not a bit afraid of the plain, nor the way that’s before us.  Come along with me, and let’s see what’s there.”

“Do you think you know where we are going, across that plain?” she asked him painfully; “even where we are to try to go?”

“No, I don’t know, now,” he answered undismayed.  “But I think we will know it as we go along because we will be together.”

* * * * *

The darkness, folding itself like a velvet mantle about the far mountains, deepened, and her voice deepened with it.  “Can you even promise that we won’t lose each other there?” she asked somberly.

At this he suddenly took her into his arms, silently, bending his face to hers, his insistent eyes bringing hers up to meet his gaze.  She could feel the strong throbbing of his heart all through her own body.

She clung to him as though she were drowning.  And indeed she felt that she was.  Life burst over them with a roar, a superb flooding tide on whose strong swelling bosom they felt themselves rising, rising illimitably.

The sun had now wholly set, leaving to darkness the old, old plain, soaked with humanity.

CHAPTER II

INTERLUDE

     March 15, 1920.
        8:30 A.M.

Marise fitted little Mark’s cap down over his ears and buttoned his blue reefer coat close to his throat.

“Now you big children,” she said, with an anxious accent, to Paul and Elly standing with their school-books done up in straps, “be sure to keep an eye on Mark at recess-time.  Don’t let him run and get all hot and then sit down in the wind without his coat.  Remember, it’s his first day at school, and he’s only six.”

She kissed his round, smooth, rosy cheek once more, and let him go.  Elly stooped and took her little brother’s mittened hand in hers.  She said nothing, but her look on the little boy’s face was loving and maternal.

Paul assured his mother seriously, “Oh, I’ll look out for Mark, all right.”

Mark wriggled and said, “I can looken out for myself wivout Paul!”

Their mother looked for a moment deep into the eyes of her older son, so clear, so quiet, so unchanging and true.  “You’re a good boy, Paul, a real comfort,” she told him.

To herself she thought, “Yes, all his life he’ll look out for people and get no thanks for it.”

* * * * *