hway for the last three miles of its length was simply
two ruts on the hillside. As soon as it came in sight Bill recognized
the driver,--a man who operated a line of auto-stages, during the
summer months, on the long river-road below. The next instant the car
drew up beside the hotel.

To a man of cities there would have been nothing particularly unusual in
this sight of a well-groomed man and girl in the tonneau of an
automobile. The man was a familiar type, of medium size, precise, his
outing clothes just a trifle garish; the girl trim and sweet-faced, and
stylish from the top of her head to the soles of her expensive little
boots. But no moment of Bill's life had ever been fraught with a
greater wonder. None had ever such a quality of the miraculous. None
had ever gone so deep.

He had not known many women, this dark man of the forests. He had seen
Indian squaws in plenty, stolid and fat, he had known a few of the wives
of the Bradleyburg men,--women pretty enough, good housekeepers,
neatly clad and perhaps a little saddened and crushed by the very
remorselessness of this land in which they lived. But there had been no
girls in Bradleyburg to grow up with, no schoolday sweethearts. He had
known the dark and desolate forests, never a sweetheart's kiss. His
mother was now but a memory: tenderness, loveliness, personal beauty to
hold the eyes had been wholly without his bourne. And he gazed at
Virginia Tremont as a man might look at a celestial light.

If the girl could have seen the swift flood of worship that flowed into
his face, she would have felt no scorn. She was of the cities, caste
had hardened her as far as it could harden one of her nature, she was a
thoroughbred to the last inch, used to flattery and the attentions of
men of her own class; yet she would have held no contempt for this tall,
bronzed man that looked at her with such awe and wonder. The surge of
feeling was real in him; and reality is one thing, over the broad earth,
that no human being dares to scorn. If she could have read deeper she
would have found in herself an unlooked-for answer, in a small measure
at least, to a lifelong dream, an ideal come true, and even she--in
her high place--would have known a little whisper of awe.

All his life, it seemed to him, Bill had dreamed dreams--dreams that
he would not admit into his conscious thought and which he constantly
tried to disavow because he considered their substance did not