“It is,” interrupted Eleanor, “if it weaves the thing worth while into the warp and woof of your life so it can never be anything but a part of you!  Turn your broncho round here and ride along side of me.  Look at our Mountain ahead!  It isn’t a Cross:  it’s a Crown!  Do you think I’m going to push a crown away from myself for the sake of having a lot of flunkeys in a land I don’t know bending themselves in their middle at me all my life?” She laughed joyously, flinging her arms wide to the drive and toss of the rolling wind tunneling up the trail on their backs.  She had pulled off her hat and the wind tossed forward her hair in a frame of curls round an enamel miniature that always haunted Wayland.  “I love it,” she said, “the harder it blows, the harder I want to ride!  You remember that night coming down the Ridge in the storm?  It was like Love and Life!  And smell the air, Dick!  It has all the sunbeams of the summer imprisoned, done up in balsam fir and balm of gilead and spices!  Exchange this life in the open, here, in the very thick of things doing, for that ancient tapestry plush upholstery blue-book existence?”

“I can’t ask you, Eleanor!  I haven’t a thing on earth to offer but a broken reputation and a lot of plans in the ditch!  I ought never to have let you know I loved you!  I ought never to have let you care for me!  You know what you think and you know what I think of a man who lets a woman give all.  He isn’t worthy of her.  You know you have never been out of my thoughts day or night since I met you, dear!  I couldn’t have come through that Desert thing alive without you; and I’ll hold you in my heart every day of my life till I die.”  He had taken off his hat and kicked the stirrups free and was riding with loose rein.

When a man tells a woman that he is down and out financially and dare not ask her to marry him, do you think there is an end of it, dear reader?  Do you think a Silenus would hesitate and stickle and scruple over a point of honor; though some of us have seen Silenus blunder into a paradise which he promptly transformed into a sty?  And do you think the descendant of the Man of the Iron Hand thought anything less of her lover for refusing to accept renunciation as his right?  If Wayland could have trusted himself to look at her, he would have seen that she was riding with a whimsical smile.  They came to a bend in the upward climbing trail that overlooked the Valley and faced the opal shining peak.

“There goes the buckboard,” remarked Wayland.

“Dick,” she said, “I’ll write my lawyer about placing the loan in the bank at once.  You need not lose any time.”

“But, I can’t take that, Eleanor!  I haven’t any security on earth to offer you.”

“Oh, yes you have!  I’ve thought all that out, too.  You have the very best security I ever want.”

“What?” asked Wayland incredulously.  “Do you mean you trust to my honesty?  Good intentions aren’t usually a banking proposition—­”