Wayland could not answer.  His eyes had filled.  He rode with his hand on the pommel of the saddle.  Her words had fallen like whiplashes.  It was true.  You could not cut out and disconnect with life.  He had dreamed of this last ride as a sort of mid-heaven ecstasy; and behold, instead of love’s dream, the lifting kick to a limp spine.  If only one’s friends would oftener give us that lifting kick instead of the softening sympathy!  If only they would brace our back bone instead of our wish bone!

Then, she turned to him with a sudden tenderness:  “What a beast I am to speak so to you when you’ve just had the blow of public dismissal on top of five years’ continuous grilling,” and he saw that the flame in her cheeks, in her eyes, was not anger but a gust of passionate love.

“I can’t thank you Eleanor,” he said.  “This is beyond thanks.”

“And your old editor man was so funny about it,” she went on.  “You know Dick, I think he had really come round to the hotel to have a consolation drink with you; and he almost let it out; but just at the last moment he changed the word and said he’d come ‘to shake’ with you on being dismissed together.”

“When do you leave?” asked Wayland dully.

“I don’t leave!  I haven’t the slightest intention of ever leaving this Valley!  Why, Dick, would you have me exchange this splendid big free new life where men and women do things, for a parish existence—­working slippers for a curate and talking dress, Dick—­dress like the Colonel’s wife, and chronicling what Shakespeare calls ‘small beer’?  I don’t intend ever to leave the Valley!  Tennyson sung of ’the federation of the world,’ Dick!  You and I are seeing it in the making!  Think of the fun of my staying and seeing it and having a finger in the making, just a little quiet finger that nobody knows about but you and me!  United States of the World, Dick; and you are going after the Man Higher Up just as you went after those blackguards into the Desert.”  She laughed joyously, joyous as a child, swinging out her arms to the sweep of the roaring Forest wind.  “Don’t look shocked.  I’ll not stay on alone at the Ranch House for the Rookery to talk about!  I’ll insist on the foreman marrying an aged house keeper for me; or I’ll move over to the Mission School; or—­Oh, I’ll plan out something; but I am not going to leave the West.”

Wayland suddenly wheeled his horse across her way and faced her.  “So you’ve been trouncing the hide off my back for an hour or more to make me believe all this doesn’t mean renunciation?  They splashed their filthy hogwash on your skirts to foil me; and that was nothing!  The fight was to go on just the same.  I was not to stop because of any injury that came to you.  Then, they assassinated your father; and you know as well as I do he was shot down by that drunken Shanty Town sot in mistake for me; but the fight is to go on just the same. That, too, is nothing if the cause be won.  Now, you take a slice of your fortune and slam it into the cause, backing me; and you renounce everything that gives meaning to life for a woman, pretending that renunciation is a privilege—­”