“I want you to use it,” he said.  “I’m proud of it.  I will take you wherever you wish to go, I will do whatever you want.  I’ll get a home in Denver, and just manage the business from the outside.  I can live the way you like to live and do the things you like to have done; Connie, I know I can.”

Connie reached slowly for her hand-bag.  From it she took a tiny note-book and tossed it in the fire.

“Literary material,” she explained, smiting at him.  “I can not write what I have learned in Fort Morgan.  I can only live it.”

CHAPTER XXIII

THE SUNNY SLOPE

After Connie’s visit, when she had returned to Chicago to finish learning how to write her knowledge, David and Carol with little Julia settled down in the cottage among the pines, and the winter came and the mountains were huge white monuments over the last summer that had died.  Later in the winter a nurse came in to take charge of the little family, and although Carol was afraid of her, she obeyed with childish confidence whenever the nurse gave directions.

“I feel fine to-day,” David said to her one morning.  “I think when spring comes I shall be stronger again.  It is a good thing to be alive.”

He glanced through the window and looked at Carol, buttoning Julia’s gaiters for the fifth time that morning.

“It is a pretty nice world to most of us,” said the nurse.

“We each have a world of our own, I guess.  Mine is Carol and Julia now.  I have no grouch at life, and I register no complaint against circumstances, but I should be glad to live in my little world a long, long time.”

One morning when spring had come, when the white monuments melted and drifted away with the clouds, and when the shadowy canyons and the yellow rocky peaks stood out bare and bright, David called her to him.

“Look,” he said, “the same old sunny slope.  We have been climbing it four years now, a long climb, sometimes pretty rough and rugged for you.”

“It was not, David,—­never,” she protested quickly.  “It was always a clear bright path.  And we’ve been finding things to laugh at all the way.”

He pulled her into his arm beside him on the bed.  “We are going to the top of the sunny slope together.  Look at the mountain there.  We are going up one of those sunny ridges, and sometime, after a while, we will stand at the top, right on the summit, with the sky above and the valleys below.”

She nodded her head, smiling at him bravely.

“I think it is probably very near to Heaven,” he said slowly, in a dreamy voice.  “I think it must be.  It is so intensely bright,—­see how it cuts into the blue.  Yes, it must be right at the gates of Heaven.  We will stand right there together, won’t we?”

“David,” she whispered.