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the valley, to which his daughter listened at night in skeptical silence. Now and then his voice fell from some overhanging crag in a torrent of religious rapture, penetrating the cabin walls and trying Mrs. Dysart's pious soul beyond endurance. "Now listen to that, Emeline!" said John, exultantly, during one of these vocal inundations. "He's a-singin' the doxology. Now _I_ believe he's a Christian." Mrs. Dysart averted her face with a sigh of long-suffering patience. "Singin' is the easiest part of the Christian religion, Jawn. As for that,"--she jerked her head toward the source of vocal supply,--"it's soundin' brass; that's what I'd say if I was settin' in judgment, which I thank our heavenly Fawther I'm not." "Well, there goes Mr. Palmerston and the girl, anyway," said John, with eager irrelevance; "they seem to be gettin' pretty thick." Mrs. Dysart moved toward the open window with piously restrained curiosity. "I'm sorry for that girl," she said; "she's got one man more'n she can manage now, without tacklin' another." "Oh, well, now, Emeline, young folks, will be young folks, you know." There was in John's voice something dangerously near satisfaction with this well-known peculiarity of youth. "Yes; and they'll be old folks, too, which most of 'em seems to forget," returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after the retreating couple. Mrs. Dysart was right. Sidney Palmerston and his companion were not thinking of old age that winter day. The mesa stretched a mass of purple lupine at their feet. There was the odor of spring, the warmth of summer, the languor of autumn, in the air. As they neared the canyon the path grew narrow, and the girl walked ahead, turning now and then, and blocking the way, in the earnestness of her speech. They had long since ceased to talk of the tunnel; Sidney had ceased even to think of it. For weeks he had hardly dared to think at all. There had been at first the keen sense of disappointment in himself which comes to every confident soul as it learns the limitations of its own will; then the determination, so easy to youth's foreshortening view, to keep the letter of his promise and bury the spirit out of his own sight and the sight of the world forever; then the self-pity and the pleading with fate for a little happiness as an advance deposit on the promise of lifelong self-sacrifice; then the perfumed days when thought was lulled and duty became a memory
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