June had almost passed and summer lay upon the lonely land.  Such perfect and wonderful weather had never before been Carley’s experience.  The dawns broke cool, fresh, fragrant, sweet, and rosy, with a breeze that seemed of heaven rather than earth, and the air seemed tremulously full of the murmur of falling water and the melody of mocking birds.  At the solemn noontides the great white sun glared down hot—­so hot that t burned the skin, yet strangely was a pleasant burn.  The waning afternoons were Carley’s especial torment, when it seemed the sounds and winds of the day were tiring, and all things were seeking repose, and life must soften to an unthinking happiness.  These hours troubled Carley because she wanted them to last, and because she knew for her this changing and transforming time could not last.  So long as she did not think she was satisfied.

Maples and sycamores and oaks were in full foliage, and their bright greens contrasted softly with the dark shine of the pines.  Through the spaces between brown tree trunks and the white-spotted holes of the sycamores gleamed the amber water of the creek.  Always there was murmur of little rills and the musical dash of little rapids.  On the surface of still, shady pools trout broke to make ever-widening ripples.  Indian paintbrush, so brightly carmine in color, lent touch of fire to the green banks, and under the oaks, in cool dark nooks where mossy bowlders lined the stream, there were stately nodding yellow columbines.  And high on the rock ledges shot up the wonderful mescal stalks, beginning to blossom, some with tints of gold and others with tones of red.

Riding along down the canyon, under its looming walls, Carley wondered that if unawares to her these physical aspects of Arizona could have become more significant than she realized.  The thought had confronted her before.  Here, as always, she fought it and denied it by the simple defense of elimination.  Yet refusing to think of a thing when it seemed ever present was not going to do forever.  Insensibly and subtly it might get a hold on her, never to be broken.  Yet it was infinitely easier to dream than to think.

But the thought encroached upon her that it was not a dreamful habit of mind she had fallen into of late.  When she dreamed or mused she lived vaguely and sweetly over past happy hours or dwelt in enchanted fancy upon a possible future.  Carley had been told by a Columbia professor that she was a type of the present age—­a modern young woman of materialistic mind.  Be that as it might, she knew many things seemed loosening from the narrowness and tightness of her character, sloughing away like scales, exposing a new and strange and susceptible softness of fiber.  And this blank habit of mind, when she did not think, and now realized that she was not dreaming, seemed to be the body of Carley Burch, and her heart and soul stripped of a shell.  Nerve and emotion and spirit received something