At the mine’s mouth he paused.  Not a feature remained of the cave that he had discovered five years ago, but sitting there upon his horse, how readily he reconstructed the scene!  Ah, how easy it was!  Every line of that cave, the new fresh earth, the gleaming black seam, the very stones in the walls, he could replace.  Carefully, deliberately, he recalled the incidents of the evening spent in the cave:  the very words she spoke; how her lips moved as she spoke them; how her eyes glanced, now straight at him, now from under the drooping lids; how she smiled, how she wept, how she laughed aloud; how her face shone with the firelight playing on it, and the soul light radiating through it.  He revelled in the memory of it all.  There was the very spot where Mr. Penny had lain in vocal slumber.  Here he had stood with the snowstorm beating on his face.  He resolved to trace step by step the path he had taken that night, and to taste again the bliss of which he had drunk so deep.  And all the while, as he rode down the gorge, underneath the rapture of remembering, he was conscious of an exquisite pain.  But he would go through with it.  He would not allow the pain to spoil his day, his last day near her.  Down by the running water, as on that night, underneath and through the crowding trees, out to where the gorge widened into the valley, he rode.  When hark!  He paused.  Was that Queen’s bay?  Surely it was.  “A wolf?” he thought.  “No, there are none left in the glen.”  He shrank from meeting any one that afternoon.  He waited to hear again that deep, soft trumpet note, and strained his ear for voices.  But all was still except for the falling of a ripe leaf now and then through the trees.  He hated to give up the afternoon he had planned.

He rode on.  He reached the more open timber.  He remembered that it was here he had first caught the sound of voices behind that blinding drift.  Through the poplars he pressed his horse.  It was at this very spot that, through an opening in the storm, he had first caught sight—­what!  His heart stood still, and then leaped into his throat.  There, on the very spot where he had seen her that night, she stood again to-day!  Was it a vision of his fond imagination?  He passed his hand over his eyes.  No, she was there still! standing among the golden poplars, the sunlight falling all around her.  With all his boyhood’s frenzy in his heart, he gazed at her till she turned and looked toward him.  A moment more, with his spurs into his horse’s side, he crashed through the scrub and was at her side.

“You! you!” he cried, in the old cry.  “Marjorie!  Marjorie!”

Once more he had her in his arms.  Once more he was kissing her face, her eyes, her lips.  Once more she was crying, “Oh, Kalman!  Stop!  You must stop!  You must stop!” And then, as before, she laid her head upon his breast, sobbing, “When I saw the dogs I feared you would come, but I could not run away.  Oh, you must stop!  Oh, I am so happy!” And then he put her from him and looked at her.