up early next morning, eager and
curious, to see how the increasing altitude would affect him. Only
towards the end of the second day after eating his dinner did he begin
to feel oppressed.

"I smell the altitude," he confessed--"me breath is shortenin' a bit,
but 'tis good to see the peaks again."

In this long ride the girl-wife dwelt dangerously on the bright face of
Ben Fordyce. It was the thought of seeing him again that came at last to
steal away her regret at parting from her Eastern friends. The splendor
of the Eastern world faded at last, and she, too, soared gladly towards
the mountains. Every doubt was swallowed up in a pleasure which was at
once pure and beyond her control.

Ben would be at the station, she was certain, for Lucius had wired to
him the time of their arrival, and he had instantly replied. "I'll be
there, and very glad to see you"--these words, few and simple, were
addressed to Marshall Haney, but they thrilled her almost as if Ben had
spoken them to her. Was he as glad to have her return as she was to meet
him again?

"A fine lad," remarked Haney, as he pocketed the envelope. "I wonder
does he marry soon? He'd better decide now. I reckon Alice is not long
for this climate--poor girl!"

His remark, so simple in itself, pierced to the centre of Bertha's
momentary self-deception. "I have no right to think of him. He belongs
to Alice Heath!" But the feeling that she herself belonged to Marshall
Haney was gone. That she owed him service was true, but since the night
of his drunkenness she had definitely and finally abandoned all thought
of being his wife, soul to soul, in the rite that sanctifies law. True,
he had kept his word, he had not offended again, but the mischief was
done. To return to the plane on which they had stood when she gave her
promise was impossible.

The day and the hour were such as make the plain lover content with his
world. The earth, a mighty robe of closely woven velvet, mottled softly
in variant greens, swept away to the west, under a soaring convexity of
saffron sky, towards a cloudy altar whereon small wisps of vapor were
burning down to golden embers, while beneath lay the dark-blue Rampart
range. It was a world for horsemen, for free rovers, and for swift and
tireless desert-kine. The course of winds, it lay, a play-ground for
tempests that formed along the great divide and swept down over the
antlike homes of men, acknowledging no barrier, exultant of their