“Sometimes I wish I did,” he answered, with a laugh; “the humdrum existence of getting practice enough to keep a horse is not the most exciting in the world.  To what particular deed of violence do you refer?”

“The last achievement, which is in every one’s mouth, that of assisting Mr. Tooting down-stairs.”

“I have been defamed,” Austen laughed; “he fell down, I believe.  But as I have a somewhat evil reputation, and as he came out of my entry, people draw their own conclusions.  I can’t imagine who told you that story.”

“Never mind,” she answered.  “You see, I have certain sources of information about you.”

He tingled over this, and puzzled over it so long that she laughed.

“Does that surprise you?” she asked.  “I fail to see why I should be expected to lose all interest in my friends—­even if they appear to have lost interest in me.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” he cried so sharply that she wished her words unsaid.  “You can’t mean it!  You don’t know!”

She trembled at the vigorous passion he put into the words.

“No, I don’t mean it,” she said gently.

The wind had made a rent in the sheet of the clouds, and through it burst the moon in her full glory, flooding field and pasture, and the black stretches of pine forest at their feet.  Below them the land fell away, and fell again to the distant broadening valley, to where a mist of white vapour hid the course of the Blue.  And beyond, the hills rose again, tier upon tier, to the shadowy outline of Sawanec herself against the hurrying clouds and the light-washed sky.  Victoria, gazing at the scene, drew a deep breath, and turned and looked at him in the quick way which he remembered so well.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it is so beautiful that it hurts to look at it.  You love it—­do you ever feel that way?”

“Yes,” he said, but his answer was more than the monosyllable.  “I can see that mountain from my window, and it seriously interferes with my work.  I really ought to move into another building.”

There was a little catch in her laugh.

“And I watch it,” she continued, “I watch it from the pine grove by the hour.  Sometimes it smiles, and sometimes it is sad, and sometimes it is far, far away, so remote and mysterious that I wonder if it is ever to come back and smile again.”

“Have you ever seen the sunrise from its peak?” said Austen.

“No.  Oh, how I should love to see it!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, you would like to see it,” he answered simply.  He would like to take her there, to climb, with her hand in his, the well-known paths in the darkness, to reach the summit in the rosy-fingered dawn:  to see her stand on the granite at his side in the full glory of the red light, and to show her a world which she was henceforth to share with him.

Some such image, some such vision of his figure on the rock, may have been in her mind as she turned her face again toward the mountain.