in its slumbering sheen out of that mighty mysteryland that reached to the lap of the setting sun.  He spoke to her of that land as she looked, wide-eyed, quick-breathing, her fingers closing still more tightly about his.  This was but the beginning of the glory of the west and the north, he told her.  Beyond that low horizon, where the tree tops touched the sky were the prairies—­not the tiresome monotony which she had seen from the car windows, but the wide, glorious, God-given country of the Northwest with its thousands of lakes and rivers and its tens of thousands of square miles of forests; and beyond those things, still farther, were the foothills, and beyond the foothills the mountains.  And in those mountains the river down there had its beginning.

She looked up swiftly, her eyes brimming with the golden flash of the sun.  “It is wonderful!  And just over there is the town!”

“Yes, and beyond the town are the cities.”

“And off there—­”

“God’s country,” said Keith devoutly.

Mary Josephine drew a deep breath.  “And people still live in towns and cities!” she exclaimed in wondering credulity.  “I’ve dreamed of ’over here,’ Derry, but I never dreamed that.  And you’ve had it for years and years, while I—­oh, Derry!”

And again those two words filled his heart with gladness, words of loving reproach, atremble with the mysterious whisper of a great desire.  For she was looking into the west.  And her eyes and her heart and her soul were in the west, and suddenly Keith saw his way as though lighted by a flaming torch.  He came near to forgetting that he was Conniston.  He spoke of his dream, his desire, and told her that last night—­before she came—­he had made up his mind to go.  She had come to him just in time.  A little later and he would have been gone, buried utterly away from the world in the wonderland of the mountains.  And now they would go together.  They would go as he had planned to go, quietly, unobtrusively; they would slip away and disappear.  There was a reason why no one should know, not even McDowell.  It must be their secret.  Some day he would tell her why.  Her heart thumped excitedly as he went on like a boy planning a wonderful day.  He could see the swifter beat of it in the flush that rose into her face and the joy glowing tremulously in her eyes as she looked at him.  They would get ready quietly.  They might go tomorrow, the next day, any time.  It would be a glorious adventure, just they two, with all the vastness of that mountain paradise ahead of them.

“We’ll be pals,” he said.  “Just you and me, Mary Josephine.  We’re all that’s left.”

It was his first experiment, his first reference to the information he had gained in the letters, and swift as a flash Mary Josephine’s eyes turned up to him.  He nodded, smiling.  He understood their quick questioning, and he held her hand closer and began to walk with her down the slope.