The dead whiteness of Glenn’s face, the lightning scorn of his eyes, the grim, stark strangeness of him then had for Carley a terrible harmony with this passionate denunciation of her, of her kind, of the America for whom he had lost all.

“Oh, Glenn!—­forgive—­me!” she faltered.  “I was only—­talking.  What do I know?  Oh, I am blind—­blind and little!”

She could not bear to face him for a moment, and she hung her head.  Her intelligence seemed concentrating swift, wild thoughts round the shock to her consciousness.  By that terrible expression of his face, by those thundering words of scorn, would she come to realize the mighty truth of his descent into the abyss and his rise to the heights.  Vaguely she began to see.  An awful sense of her deadness, of her soul-blighting selfishness, began to dawn upon her as something monstrous out of dim, gray obscurity.  She trembled under the reality of thoughts that were not new.  How she had babbled about Glenn and the crippled soldiers!  How she had imagined she sympathized!  But she had only been a vain, worldly, complacent, effusive little fool.  She had here the shock of her life, and she sensed a greater one, impossible to grasp.

“Carley, that was coming to you,” said Glenn, presently, with deep, heavy expulsion of breath.

“I only know I love you—­more—­more,” she cried, wildly, looking up and wanting desperately to throw herself in his arms.

“I guess you do—­a little,” he replied.  “Sometimes I feel you are a kid.  Then again you represent the world—­your world with its age-old custom—­its unalterable. . . .  But, Carley, let’s get back to my work.”

“Yes—­yes,” exclaimed Carley, gladly.  “I’m ready to—­to go pet your hogs —­anything.”

“By George!  I’ll take you up,” he declared.  “I’ll bet you won’t go near one of my hogpens.”

“Lead me to it!” she replied, with a hilarity that was only a nervous reversion of her state.

“Well, maybe I’d better hedge on the bet,” he said, laughing again.  “You have more in you than I suspect.  You sure fooled me when you stood for the sheep-dip.  But, come on, I’ll take you anyway.”

So that was how Carley found herself walking arm in arm with Glenn down the canyon trail.  A few moments of action gave her at least an appearance of outward composure.  And the state of her emotion was so strained and intense that her slightest show of interest must deceive Glenn into thinking her eager, responsive, enthusiastic.  It certainly appeared to loosen his tongue.  But Carley knew she was farther from normal than ever before in her life, and that the subtle, inscrutable woman’s intuition of her presaged another shock.  Just as she had seemed to change, so had the aspects of the canyon undergone some illusive transformation.  The beauty of green foliage and amber stream and brown tree trunks and gray rocks and red walls was there; and the summer drowsiness and languor lay as deep; and the loneliness and solitude brooded with its same eternal significance.  But some nameless enchantment, perhaps of hope, seemed no longer to encompass her.  A blow had fallen upon her, the nature of which only time could divulge.