She was still sitting on the rock, gazing down the mountain, her face sober.  Her hat was off, and the wind was blowing the short strands of her hair around her face.  She was leaning back a little, braced by a hand upon the rock.  She looked a goddess of the mountain tops, Jack thought.  He stood there staring up at her, just as he had stared down at her when she had stood looking into the lake.  Did she feel as he felt about the woods and mountains? he wondered.  She seemed rather fond of staring and staring and saying nothing—­and yet, he remembered, when she talked she gave no hint at all of any deep sense of the beauty of her surroundings.  When she talked she was just like other town girls he had known, a bit slangy, more than a bit self-possessed, and frivolous to the point of being flippant.  That type he knew and could meet fairly on a level.  But when she was looking and saying nothing, she seemed altogether different.  Which, he wondered, was the real Marion Rose?

While he stood gazing, she turned and looked down at him; a little blankly at first, as though she had just waked from sleep or from abstraction too deep for instant recovery.  Then she smiled and changed her position, putting up both hands to pat and pull her hair into neatness; and with the movement she ceased to be a brooding goddess of the mountain tops, and became again the girl who had perversely taken the telephone away from him, the girl who had played mock billiards upon his beloved chart, the girl who said—­she said it now, while he was thinking of her melodious way of saying it.

“Well, what do you know about that?” she inquired, making a gesture with one arm toward the fire while with the other she fumbled in her absurd little vanity bag.  “It just burns as if it had a grudge against the country, doesn’t it?  But isn’t it perfectly gorgeous, with all that sunset and everything!  It looks like a Bliffen ten-reel picture.  He ought to see it—­he could get some great pointers for his next big picture.  Wouldn’t that be just dandy on the screen?” She had found her powder puff and her tiny mirror, and she was dabbing at her nose and her cheeks, which no more needed powder than did the little birds that chirped around her.  Between dabs, she was looking down the mountain, with an occasional wave of her puff toward some particularly “striking effect” of fire and sunset and rolling smoke and tall pines seen dimly in the background.

Jack wanted to climb up there and shake her out of her frivolity.  Which was strange when you consider that all his life, until three months ago, he had lived in the midst of just such unthinking flippancy, had been a part of it and had considered—­as much as he ever considered anything—­that it was the only life worth living.

He went around the little rock pinnacle and stood looking somberly down at the devastation that was being wrought, with no greater beginning, probably, than a dropped match or cigarette stub.  He was thinking hazily that so his old life had been swept away in the devastating effect of a passing whim, a foolish bit of play.  The girl irritated him with her chatter—­yet three months ago he himself would have considered it brilliant conversation, and would have exerted himself to keep pace with her.