Her face had now lost its whiteness; it was flushed, rosy, warm.

“Where—­did you—­ever learn—­to run over rocks—­this way?” he panted.

“All my life I’ve climbed,” she said.  “Ah! it’s so good to be up on the walls again—­to feel the wind—­to see!”

Thereafter he kept close to her, no matter what the effort.  He would not miss a moment of her, if he could help it.  She was wonderful.  He imagined she must be like an Indian girl, or a savage who loved the lofty places and the silence.  When she leaped she uttered a strange, low, sweet cry of wildness and exultation.  Shefford guessed she was a girl freed from her prison, forgetting herself, living again youthful hours.  Still she did not forget him.  She waited for him at the bad places, lent him a strong hand, and sometimes let it stay long in his clasp.  Tireless and agile, sure-footed as a goat, fleet and wild she leaped and climbed and ran until Shefford marveled at her.  This adventure was indeed fulfilment of a dream.  Perhaps she might lead him to the treasure at the foot of the rainbow.  But that thought, sad with memory daring forth from its grave, was irrevocably linked with a girl who was dead.  He could not remember her, in the presence of this wonderful creature who was as strange as she was beautiful.  When Shefford reached for the brown hand stretched forth to help him in a leap, when he felt its strong clasp, the youth and vitality and life of it, he had the fear of a man who was running towards a precipice and who could not draw back.  This was a climb, a lark, a wild race to the Mormon girl, bound now in the village, and by the very freedom of it she betrayed her bonds.  To Shefford it was also a wild race, but toward one sure goal he dared not name.

They went on, and at length, hand in hand, even where no steep step or wide fissure gave reason for the clasp.  But she seemed unconscious.  They were nearing the last height, a bare eminence, when she broke from him and ran up the smooth stone.  When he surmounted it she was standing on the very summit, her arms wide, her full breast heaving, her slender body straight as an Indian’s, her hair flying in the wind and blazing in the sun.  She seemed to embrace the west, to reach for something afar, to offer herself to the wind and distance.  Her face was scarlet from the exertion of the climb, and her broad brow was moist.  Her eyes had the piercing light of an eagle’s, though now they were dark.  Shefford instinctively grasped the essence of this strange spirit, primitive and wild.  She was not the woman who had met him at the spring.  She had dropped some side of her with that Mormon hood, and now she stood totally strange.

She belonged up here, he divined.  She was a part of that wildness.  She must have been born and brought up in loneliness, where the wind blew and the peaks loomed and silence held dominion.  The sinking sun touched the rim of the distant wall, and as if in parting regret shone with renewed golden fire.  And the girl was crowned as with a glory.